[EVENT] OwOky SpOwOky Pumpkin Picking

When a job as easy as pumpkin picking in various places all over Fiore appears on the Silver Wolf job board, it clears out fast. By the time Theo got there to see what job offerings there were, there was only one left. Sakuramori. Theo didn't know why that one might have been left, but without thinking of the implications, he snatched it and saw jewel signs in his eyes.

Gathering up two guildmates to go with him, soon the ace was flying his pirate ship off the side of the mountain with Aspen and Mercury to keep him company. The beautiful forest was actually quite close to the guildhall, aerially speaking. Twenty minutes later, Theo, despite all his flare for mishaps, expertly landed his gilded pirate ship at the edge of the sea of pink-dipped trees.

It was as if autumn had no power over this place. The aptly named forest was full of sakura trees in full bloom, despite spring being long passed. Theo had never been to this place, so his arctic hues widened, mystified as he exited his airboat. "Whoa!" he exclaimed, almost childlike as he jogged ahead and straight down a worn path leading beneath the beautiful canopy. The magic of Sakuramori was palpable, something Theo largely ignored. He only grinned and touched the blooms, spotting a winding path leading into the fairyland.

Like most well-laid traps, a cart waited not too far down the path, ready for all the pumpkins they'd pick. The question was...what pumpkins? Where was the patch? They didn't grow in forests...or did they? Just as he'd been about to say so, he saw a peculiarly glowing gourd between two lush bushes. "Oh...Oh, guys! There are pumpkins in here!" he informed them with much enthusiasm as if he'd spoken his doubt about the existence of pumpkins here, which he definitely had not. "It's like a treasure hunt!" Of course, it was. If he could make a treasure hunt out of something, he would. Not many things in life thrilled him more than a search these days. "We have to explore to find them, how cool. This day just got so much better."

As he reached for another by a trunk a few feet off the path, the derpy man got his own feet caught on some vines, dramatically tumbling into the glistening undergrowth with a surprised shriek. "I'm ok!" he called with a laugh, retrieving the second pumpkin even though his butt was where his head should be against the trunk. Flopping over in an attempt to right himself, just as he rolled from his back to his knees to get up, he came face to face with a... a...

"G-G-GHOST!" Theo wailed, clamoring out of the bushes to collapse onto the path. Leaves stuck to his navy tracksuit and in his onyx hair and even at the tip of the finger he held out, trembling as it pointed to a hazy figure with a grinning face in the process of fading from sight. Now hold up! No one had mentioned that this pretty forest would be haunted! Theo was an easily spooked soul! How cruel...

As usual, no one saw what he saw. Also, as usual, he ignored Aspen's harsh tone and treated her as if she'd been speaking with all the cheerfulness of a twitterpated sparrow in the height of spring, so far acting like it didn't bother him that she rarely, if ever, called him by his actual name. "I'm always a little crazy, I've been told," he grinned, shaking off the fear for now but not the forest-y debris. If neither of the girls saw the ghost, maybe he did imagine it. Probably not, but maybe. There was no use in trying to describe it to convince them. Ghosts were better left to personal experience, though the idea that it was still lurking in the undergrowth still freaked him out a little. Maybe if he stuck strictly to the path, nothing would show itself.

Theo was a derpy young man, but he was pretty observant when he needed to be. The dark birds swooping at his new friend didn't escape his icy eyes. He was in the same boat as the other two. Most of Theo's life had not been lived in Fiore, so he wasn't sure how Fiore crows behaved. Also, while he'd heard of this place, he'd never actually been here, so maybe this was something special to the area. Of all the places he'd traveled, it wasn't farfetched that the flora and fauna might act out of the norm. He'd seen it before, especially in caves and high on mountains. The more isolated the area, the more protective the animals.

Wait, where these crows? The onyx haired man made some sort of whine sound, finding the creatures absolutely annoying. Crows and magpies were known for snatching shinies. He'd had to fend them off of his treasures more than once, and if someone ever asked, he would tell them that tracking down a feathery thief to its nest in a huge forest was a nightmare. Maybe they were acting all demonic because they had a treasure trove here. His eyes lit up with interest and greed. Two could play this game. Of all the times they'd stolen from him, maybe he could steal something really nice back. Admittedly, the likelihood that any of these feathery jerks were the actual ones who had snatched his goods was highly unlikely, all crow kind would pay for the sins of their brethren!

However, before he could try to track any of the growing number of hostile blackbirds, shots rang out! The treasure hunter jumped like he was shot, whirling to stare at her. "H-Hey! Don't shoot them! Geez..." he wheezed, grabbing his heart as if the action would make it stop racing. "I wanna find their nests if I can. A little sidetrack from the pumpkins won't hurt, especially if it's worth a lot of jewels...right?" he suggested with a devious gleam, getting the shiny itch really bad. His imagination played out quite the scenario for him, like an old film projected on canvas. High in the pink petaled tree, there was an impossibly large nest. Crows flocked to it like bees to a hive, dropping necklaces and rings and crowns and chalices, all in glittery silver and gold. Occasionally they'd accent a pile with a rainbow assortment of gems carved statues of jade and onyx. Oh yes, he'd very much love to find this holy grail and shove it all into canvas sacks to load it onto his ship...

"Ack!" the jello man squawked, brought out of his pleasant daydream by a violent peck atop his noggin. That hurt! Still intent on a non-violent approach, Theo lobbed a blob of jello up into the air at the offending featherbrain. It hit one of the crows and absorbed it inside the translucent gelatinous mass. Only its head remained free so it could breathe because Theo was a lot of things, but he was definitely not an animal killer...unless he had to be. As the sticky sugar thudded onto the path and rolled to a stop, Theo scampered forward and crouched over it, tilting his head. "Hello, you..." he said with some distaste and disappointment, expecting there to be something more exciting about the weirdos, what with how it was acting. "It's just a grouchy bird...maybe it's hangry-- GAAAH!"

Before he could even finish his announcement and consequent musing, a fresh mass of crows filtered through the thick canopy of trees above, like a dark tornado coming to whisk Dorothy-Theo off the Land of SakuraOz. His shrieking form was totally engulfed, and the surprise of it all kept him from really defending himself. He didn't do well when he was flustered and distracted, meaning the highest-ranking member of their team today would just howl from within the black whirlwind, random explicatives filtering out to the others as he flailed in a feeble attempt to being pecked full of holes.

In a moment of action and panic, he formed a large jello gumdrop around himself in an instant, seizing himself and all the birds flocking him in a twenty-foot by twenty-foot mold of his magic's namesake. He even had some tree branches and bushes caught in it since the path through the forest wasn't very wide. The ginormous green blob jiggled and wiggled from the motion within, crows trying fruitlessly to escape before succumbing to their fate. The large sugar mountain continued to jiggle as a mass in the center moved upward slowly, eventually producing a small pimple-like protrusion bursting from the top. Though now just a neck and head with a humungous, mound-like gelatinous body of lime, Theo gasped in some glorious air before taking stock of his new situation. "Aw..." he pouted, eyes growing glossy with the threat of tears, "They all suffocated...I didn't mean to..." Great, now he'd never find their treasure he was convinced they had!

"Awwww, Aspen," the jello mage warbled, face taking on a mushy expression as his eyes threatened to spill not tears of sadness, but ones of happiness. "You called me Theo!" he gushed like a parent over a child uttering its first garbled 'da-da', extremely pleased despite his predicament. In Theo's life, it was the small things that mattered. Even in the midst of this very bizarre outing, nothing could keep him from his various distractions. As she reached out to help him out of his own crow-peppered jello mold, he reached to try and take her hand, but it was too late. He hadn't noticed the crows vibrating about and becoming this bigger thing! He only noticed it as he fought its way free, jiggling his own trapped form backward and all other directions from loose. The man wouldn't be trapped too much longer, though. Mercury came to his aid, and soon his feet were back on the ground.

As Aspen did her thing and unloaded her clips into the creature, the ice-blue eyed man watched her like a child at the circus. It was amazing. Before long the scary bird mutant was taken care of. "Wow, Aspen! That was so cool," he grinned, giving her an energetic thumbs-up, as if the thing she killed wasn't made of the crows he'd nearly sobbed over earlier.

Mercury's comment on the scarecrow drew his surprised gaze, which he now squinted. "No, I don't remember it. But maybe I missed it when the ghost scared me.." he commented, though his tone made no mistake of his frayed nerves. The line of his mouth wobbled in growing fear, finding all of this to be a little too spooky. The forest was pretty, but it seemed out to get them, and Theo didn't wanna get got. Pain and death weren't his thing, and honestly, he was pretty jumpy anyway. Ghosts and crows and scarecrows were trying to protect the pumpkins...but Theo was also a man of his word. As much as he wanted to hightail it back to the ship, he'd committed to getting these pumpkins! He just needed to see them as treasures. Hollow, edible treasures.

The suspicious scarecrow was suspicious after all. Despite his redeeming display of magic with the crows, even if that had been semi-accidental, Theo released a terrified screech and stumbled backward, letting his new friend take over the fighting of the possessed garden guardian. His fear was premature, though, as Mercury also used her guns and other metal weapons to show the enemy who was boss, Theo had time to humorously dub it a 'gardian' in his head and snicker at his pun.

Once it was defeated as well, the amazed young man's cold hues darted between the girls. "I wanna use guns, too!" Theo declared, feeling left out but excited to join in in his own way. Two jello pistols formed in each hand, though there was no enemy to use it on. As far as he knew, they were safe now. Maybe that's why he thought it was time to play around, pretending there were ghosts deep in the trees which he shot with jello bullets, jumping around and making quiet "pew pew" sounds. Sure, they weren't real guns, but they were as close as he could come with what Mercury had dubbed as his 'most bizarre' magic.

Of course, Theo once again saw the actual ghost as he was shooting an imaginary one, and it startled him so badly that he tripped once more and went rolling down a small hill, now deeper into the forest. When he stopped, he was miraculously back on his feet, but his back was against something boney and cold. Once the world stopped spinning, he noticed the growing fog, as well as the rotting gourd arm swooping around him, holding him in place as the other tried to slash at him! He screamed and screamed some more. All he'd wanted to do was pick pumpkins!

What happened next was some sort of disturbing dance. Even though the pumpkin king had a firm grip on him, his body acted more like a fluid than flesh and bone. He bent unnaturally and slipped and slid within the grip, impossibly escaping each jab and slash to the point that the ghoulish wraith with the pumpkin head stabbed its own self in the creepy cloak with a claw. It wheezed its rotting fruit breath in frustration, but Theo had only gotten started. Continuing to wriggle around, he now added shooting his guns at the creature. He pointed them behind him, backward, upside down as his body thinned into a straw shape to the left, then he reaches and blasted the thing's shoulder by stretching an arm over his own body to get to an open area of cloak. The sticky guns were shooting every which way at every angle, blowing sweet-scented holes all over the pumpkin king, until one through the orange head proved as the last straw. No longer wanting to keep Theo close to try and poison him and bathe in his blood, it gathered its dark energy and forced it out of its body.

The burst of dark energy came as a surprise, sending a lightly wounded jello man bouncing off to ping ball among the trees. Once he came to a stop he popped back up, frowning. "Now that was uncalled for..." he muttered, frowning. The pain brought out a more serious side in the man, who rose and simply held a hand up. No more games. He summoned his gigantic jello dragon that he called Smaug, and Smaug landed on his foe before doing a happy mariachi dance until the king was nothing more than pumpkin pie filling....if pumpkin pie filling was possessed, rotten, and poisonous.

Hoping that was the last of the attacks for the evening, he returned to his partners. "We're just incredibly lucky, Mercury," Theo answered at last, much delayed, but with all the threats seemingly defeated, it was safe to talk. "I'm luckiest unlucky man....or the unluckiest lucky man....Hm, well, pick either one of those, and it still remains the same. This is probably my fault, I probably should have mentioned it before. Hahaha!" the treasure hunter guffawed gregariously. Despite the bit of blood leaking from his back through his tracksuit jacket, Theo seemed keen to finish up what had once been considered a safe and easy job. He picked up a rather large one, intending to put it on the pile, but instead grew impish. Punching a hole in the bottom, he quickly scooped out the gross innards and poked a couple eyes in, placing it on his head. "WooooOOooOoo..." he moaned, putting his fingers out like claws. "I am the neewww Pumpkin Kiiing!" he howled, bending down to rapidly pick up pumpkins and throw them at his friends to catch, perhaps making the job more interesting in the process.