Pumpkin Picking in Cedar~

Amalie hadn't been to Cedar before, but for what it was worth, so far it seemed quite pleasant. A port-like town, a nice mix between modern and traditional, with quite a safe feel to it. She wandered along the pavement to the side of the roads, for once not in her uniform. After all, this wasn't an official Dies Irae mission, but more of an outing between herself, Sivvy and Johann. Checking out the town, form what she understood, Johann and Sivvy were looking to set up a base a little more Fiore-centric. So the group was taking a small breaking from their usual duties to find somewhere they agreed was suitable. She was wearing a violet blouse, some jean shorts, and white wedge-heeled sandals. Her long blue hair pulled away from her face in a high ponytail, swaying behind her as she strode along.

She paused in her step, turning to look back at the others, "It's not bad," She remarked, glancing at the wall of the building she was passing, attached to which appeared to be a bulletin board. She admires the leaflets plastered there, advertisements for shops and goods, town events and the like. As her eyes fell on a poster, she noticed the big bold words print in orange; Wanted, Pumpkin Pickers! She scanned the contents of the flyer, it appeared that it was a job request of some sort. Asking for people to gather pumpkins for an upcoming event. "Huh, does this town even have a pumpkin patch?" She mused aloud.

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"It's a shame. This is geologically one of the more suitable spots, what with the access to both Fiore and a port for our ships," Sivvy commented as she walked along with her friends, hands clasped behind her back. She was out of her uniform as well, reverting back to her old sensibilities with a black dress, only instead of it being a sundress, it had long sleeves and buttoned up to her collar bone. Most of her legs were covered with black stockings other than a glimpse of thigh just a couple of inches above the knee. A fluffy red scarf was loosely looped around her neck, taking the place of the hair that normally sheltered the skin there from any chill. Today her pink locks were tied up into a bun, though her bangs remained loose as did a longer stranf on each side to frame her cheeks. Black ankle boots completed the look. She looked almost like a normal girl this way, but the two with her would know better. The '7' inked just below her hairline peeked over the cuff of the scarf, serving as a reminder of her circumstances.

Carmine eyes scanned both the buildings and the Knights as they walked by, interest gleaming in her eyes though she said nothing else. The clone wasn't one to decide opinions based on aesthetics unless it was clothing or home decor. Actually, she wasn't one for opinions at all. Such a thing could need her to acknowledge herself as a true individual, which wasn't yet the case. She'd much rather go along with what others around her wanted since she wanted to be useful to them in any way possible. It was something too ingrained to simply break with a little growth. Even as an ambassador beside Johann, when she didn't have to be in a position of command, she was very much still a servant.

Her nose had just caught the scent of local fried fish when Amalie spoke up about a pumpkin patch. That was sudden, but she didn't question the inquiry. Sniffing the air again for a more specific reason, she did indeed pick up the scent tilled dirt and plant growth among the saltiness of the ocean air and fish in various states of existence. "On the outer skirts, there are some farms. Considering the time of year, they are bound to have pumpkins, along with other gourds, potatoes, squash, eggplant, cabbage, radishes, escarole..." Sivvy would have continued to list all the knowledge in her mind about autumn farming if Johann hadn't piped up to focus her. A pumpkin hunt? "Why do we need to hunt them? They don't have legs to run..." she wanted to know, following after the blue-haired woman and the silverette toward said patch.


Soon they stood in the rows of dirt, muddled by green vines and orange polka dots that varied in size and shape. The slayer hardly saw the point of gathering these things, since she lacked the knowledge of the seasonal importance that would require anyone other than farmers to gather them. Did they get to keep any? Sivvy wasn't much of a baker, but the thought of pumpkin pie sounded amazing...Before she could again run too far down the snack path, Johann proposed competition and piqued her interest. Whether she realized it or not, she was a bit competitive. "Okay!" she chirped, a smile starting to form on her glossed lips. Glancing between her two best friends, she was already formulating the best plan. Seconds after Johann darted into the patch, his mentee followed, picking up one or two at a time and launching them into her requip hammerspace. Efficient as ever, she'd endeavor to beat the socks off of the couple.

"Do they need to be whole?" Sivvy asked mid-battle with a head-tilt, ready to summon a lance or some sort of weapon to skewer multiple pumpkins at once. So focused on the game was the clone that she didn't notice how often she was suddenly having to shew crows away from the vines in her path, nor the alarming amount of them gathering into a loose aerial spiral overhead.

   

---

   

   

As she followed the others to the Pumpkin Patch Amalie was surprised, she had only pointed out the poster out of curiosity, but to actually end up here, helping them ...pick pumpkins. Not that she was inexperienced with gardening, but it just seemed rather random. Still, it was a change of pace from the fighting and the paperwork, plus the weather was pleasant. She glanced over at Johann, furrowing her brow in surprise as he rather enthusiastic challenged the pair of them to a 'pumpkin picking battle'. She laughed as she rushed off, wondering what had got into him. Sivvy keenly following him rushing into the fray, Amalie signed moving into the pumpkin patch, kneeling down she began to set about examining the pumpkins. Checking their quality, "Shards." She called, the magically rippling up through her throat and echoing into the air. Following which broken shards of glass would appear around her, she would gesture with her hands and the shards would sword towards the pumpkin. Slicing their vines from their stem, shifting hers into a pile as she went along. She looked over at Sivvy after her question, "Yes I should imagine they want them whole for the Jack-o'-Lanterns." She answered, before looking down and continued her work.

As she checked another pumpkin, she noticed the flickers of shadows on the ground, causing her to pause. Glancing up towards the skies, she stiffened at the side. The one pleasant blue was now gloomy and dark, which a significant number of crows circling ahead. This wasn't a normal flock, something about their behavior set her on edge. "Is it just me or are these Birds acting strange?" She asked, climbing to her feet. She flexed her fingers, redirecting her shards away from the pumpkins and upwards, all the while increasing in number, ready to attack if necessary. Her ice-blue eyes narrowing, the swarm got thicker, their cries more chaotic until finally, they would descend. They angrily beak snapping at their targets, Amalie waved her arm across the chest and upon this signal her shards would fly up to meet the crows. Meeting several of the bird's mid-air and impaling them on their sharp broken edges, each one dead in an instant, falling to the ground with a flop.

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Sivvy made a little bit of a face as she let her lance disappear, disappointed that she couldn't use it to skewer a bunch at a time. Instead, she let countless metallic threads burst from her skin, using those to slice the vines and gather them up en masse to toss into the pocket dimension, which then dumped them all in a growing pile at the edge of the patch. "What is the purpose of a Jack-o'-Lantern?" their slightly awkward friend wanted to know, visualizing what they looked like from pictures she'd seen, but not understanding why it was a thing people did this time of year.

Her desire to win wasn't curbed by her confusion over the function of the pumpkins, though. The clone was determined to gather the most, no matter what tactics her friends employed. Soon enough she noticed that they had stopped, to which she paused and glanced up. "Why did you guys stop? Did I win?" she asked hopefully, but instead only noticed their eyes on the densely speckled sky.

About the same time that Amalie downed her crows, a murder descended on Sivvy as well, covering her vision in black. At first, she thought she'd passed out or something, but the brush of feathers and the jabs from beaks and talons alerted her otherwise. She simply swatted at first, thinking perhaps it was just her hair tie with the shiny dragon's egg accent that caught their attention. Crows did love shiny things, and it seemed all but confirmed as one plucked it from her rosy locks, sending her hair cascading down. "Hey!" she called in mild irritation, being particularly fond of the accessory that had just been stolen. The mob didn't leave, though, so in an instant she had needles bursting out of her flesh in all directions, skewering them all to the ground. "Which one of you has my hair tie?" she asked rhetorically, carefully stepping between the small, black corpses in search of it when she heard Johann's call. Doing as instructed, she froze and closed her eyes, and once she opened them again, the patch had nearly as many dead crows as it had pumpkins.

Resuming her search for her stolen property, she'd just spotted its distant twinkle from a pin-cushioned bird when the bodies started to tremor and take wingless flight, coalescing into shadowy, undead figures. Her ire was misplaced initially. "Oh no!" she muttered in distress, her slayer magic launching her entire body at blinding speed into the form the thief bird had combined into, hitting it with such force with her fist that it exploded bits of dead crow everywhere. Her hair tie dropped at her feet, which made her smile as she reclaimed it and stashed it safely in her bag. Blinking her carmine eyes now that her focus was disrupted, she glanced at the other dark forms with creasing brows. This was all very strange. Very irrational. "Have I fallen asleep?" she asked her friends, not counting out the possibility that exhaustion had claimed her and this was simply one of her many nightmares. It had been a couple of days since she'd last slept.

The temperature of the patch dropped without warning as each of the undead creatures oozed an unnatural chill. They quaked as they got used to their footing, glowing maws parting into a jagged, horrifying grin, only to release a bone-chilling cacophony of shrieks. It certainly seemed like a creature from her nightmares that had even someone as emotionally unavailable as Sivvy screaming into the dark of night. "Mm," she hummed, a sword on a chain popping into existence in her hand. Nightmare or not, there was business to take care of, so she began her macabre sword dance amongst the pumpkins and beasts, slaying another with a few expert slices.

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Sivvy's question didn't surprise Amalie, she knew her friend well enough to know that the query was genuine. So, naturally, she set about explaining it to her. "Well during Halloween, it's a tradition to take a pumpkin and turn it into a decoration. You cut open the top, take out it's innards, carve a face onto it and put a candle on the inside. This creates a sort of pumpkin lantern that you place outside your house as decoration. I'm sure you'll start to see some examples closer to Halloween." She remarked to the girl. She hadn't made a Jack-o'-lantern in a long time, she used to make a few every year to decorate the front of the house with. Make them seem normal, Wyatt liked that, appearing normal. Like a happily married couple, celebrating Halloween. She hadn't minded though, it had just been another thing to occupy her mind with, to take her thoughts away from other things.

As the chaos of the angry crows fell down upon them, Amalie would glance over at Sivvy, who seemed to have taken out her crows in a similar manner. albeit using needles instead of glass. It was then she would hear Johann's cry, knowing better than to delay. She shut her eyes, bringing her arm over her face, as the plains were filled with an immense lumination of magical light. As the brightness died down, she would lower her arm, opening her eyes once more. She nodded at Johann's comment, but something bugged her. "And peculiar...why would those crows suddenly attack us?" She pondered to the others, birds didn't tend to attack humans unless they felt threatened. But they hadn't done anything but pick pumpkins, was there more to this patch of land than they realized? Or maybe there was a mage nearby with a grudge, able to influence the actions of avians? The questions riddled her mind, she was only brought away from them when she heard Johann comment once more.  She glanced over, stiffening in surprise at the sight of their newest attackers. These creatures were a combination of all the dead crows, pulled together to create human-shaped masses with giant burly bodies and an over-sized crow's head on their shoulders. Sivvy quickly took care of one of them, before asking if she had fallen asleep. Amalie chuckled, reaching for the gun she always had holstered at her hip, she pulled it out, she would bring it up to one of the closest monsters to her. Before commenting in bitter amusement; "If only, my nightmares are worse than this."

She fired a shot straight into the creature's chest, as the bullet slammed into the bird-beast its fire would suddenly set a lot as fire magic rippled through its body. The bird erupted in shrieks, flailing around as its body caught fire, Amalie fired two more shots, another in the chest and one in its skull. The creature quickly fell down dead, burning to the floor in a feathered heap. It was curious, they were especially strong creatures, but neither had been the crows that formed them. Amalie moved closer to inspect the creature, all the while another bird beast charged at her. However just a few meters short of her, it would too fall down dead, it's an entire body covered from head to toe in her shards of glass.

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Still not convinced she was awake, Sivvy turned her eyes from the dead Crow Lords and to the menacing scarecrows at the edge of the patch. "That's exactly what you'd say in my nightmares," she said quietly, nearly a mutter but not, since Sivvy didn't do that sort of thing. Where exactly the line was drawn dictating what was too irrational to make sense in the waking world was blurry at best, since Sivvy had seen many odd things in her years for hire as well as recently since meeting Johann that fateful day in Hosenka. Giant monsters and things easily explained by magic seemed alright. It was things like this, where it was nonsensical and frightening when she didn't sense a mage anywhere around pulling the strings. This is when it took on the surreality of her dreams. Crows acting contrary to their established behaviors. Their carcasses forming mindless monsters. Now straw-brained scarecrows had come to life and manifests scythes to come try and cut the three friends down. All of this, just to pick some pumpkins from a garden? It didn't line up.

Nightmare or not, the ambassador would fight with all she had, as she always did. She knew no other way. Though she might wake in the night screaming, she otherwise showed no fear in the face of danger until that one moment. Her White Rabbit sword appeared in her hand with a blue-aura flourish as she burst forward. One moment she was near the others, and in the next she was right in front of her overalled foe, slicing her blade down on it. As she did so, the clockface on her sword started ticking rapidly forward, and within seconds it not only had hay popping out of the rip in its burlap from the initial slice, but it was also now armless and nearly shredded to bits. What was left of it stood still, paralyzed for a moment on damaged legs, trying to sync back up with time. Sivvy kicked the scythe a distance away, about to call this battle done. Being weaponless and armless, it didn't matter much what the lightweight garden accessory did.

However, just to make sure it was dead, Sivvy went for some overkill. In a brilliant burst of azure energy scrolls and mist, the rosette was now clad in a black bikini and floppy beach hat, as if she was at the beach instead of in the middle of a pumpkin patch with winter approaching. Her sword disappeared and an overly large ax replaced it just as her clothes were replaced. She began to swing it over her head despite its enormous size and weight, kicking up quite the vortex filled with hay, pumpkins, and pieces of crow and scarecrow. The area around her filled with steam, scorching most of her enemy into ruin. The clone had held back though, keeping the range small so not to affect her friends.

Confident that her battle was won, she turned to check on her friends. Even if this was a dream, she still hoped even the dream versions of those closest to her were alright. Turning her back on the unpredictable foe proved unwise. Despite being disarmed (literally) and hacked into oblivion, a dismembered arm of straw rocketed toward her from a few meters away, clamping a surprisingly strong claw around her neck. Ah, she'd made the mistake of assuming the scarecrow had the same limitations of a living being. But it wasn't alive, was it? It didn't follow the rules, otherwise, it wouldn't be attacking at all. Dropping her weapon, it disappeared back into its dimension to free her hands to grapple with the possessed straw hand that was cutting off her air supply.

---

Amalie jumped back, unloading another shot into the scarecrow she had been fighting, a tremendous heat erupting from the end of the barrel as the bullet was shot. The bullet's path leaving a trail of flame flickering behind it as it hit the scarecrow, exploding on impact. The Scarecrow disintegrated under the desert-like heat, crumpling to ash in front of her. Amalie turned to the others, it seemed Johann had handled his opponent, whilst sivvy was still dealing with a lingering limb. Despite this the area seemed quiet, for a moment, Amalie was about to step in and help the rosette. When a cold chuckle appeared from behind her, she spun, moving back as she did so and narrowly avoided having her face torn off by the newest monsters' poisonous claws. What she appeared to be looking at now, was a new creature, an anthropomorphic being dressed in a long black cloak, sporting chains, and a lantern, not to mention a pumpkin in place of its head.

"Frost." She barked without hesitation, the magic rippling forth from her body and bringing forth an immediate blizzard that would cover the surrounding area. Everything that was not Amalie, Johann or Sivvy would be frozen to death by the instant cold. The Pumpkin King found himself unable to move, trapped by the blistering chilly weather that had descended upon him. Amalie flicked her wrist, creating a horde of more shards and directing them into the creature. One by one they would pierce through him, tearing through its body relentlessly, she wouldn't stop carving up the creature either. Just keep creating more shards of glass to carve it through with, until there was nothing left but a pile of fabric and the scattered remains of fruity flesh. After which, she turned to the others, the fog in the plains appearing the lift and the sky returning to normal. It seemed, for now, the threat was gone. "Cedar's more interesting than I expected, maybe we shouldn't rule it out so soon." She said with an amused smirk, before reaching down start gathering the pumpkins once more, after all, the competition wasn't over just yet.

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