Halloween Event (Pt. 3): A Nightmare Ends Another Begins

--- Jon ---

“Why don’t you get this one?” Noctis suggested.

“Do… you know what that is?” He frowned, because while he could tell it wasn’t human due to the… offness of its movements, he had no idea what the creature actually was.

“Eh, it’s harmless.” Noctis assured him. “Just interested in whether or not you can scare it given what it is.”

“And what is it?” He pressed, not liking this.

“Harmless, like I said.” Noctis repeated, uncaring -and possibly amused- by his suspicion. “Come on, given the way you’ve been acting all night I thought you’d be the last one to say no to a good surprise.”

(Problem is there’s no telling if it’s a good surprise or a bad one.) He thought to himself, knowing which one it tended to be when people pointed him at said surprises.

Knowing that arguing with someone he was going to be working with in the long term would be more of a pain than it was worth, he decided to simply suck up his misgivings and go ahead with scaring the creature that was only giving the occasional laugh at the traps his Ma set off. (Definitely going to be a tough customer then…)

Lurking from above he continued tracking the creature from the rafters above, taking in everything he could about it just in case the creature was a threat despite Noctis’s dismissal.

Which is why he waited until the creature was watching a false patient begin to spasm, before turning off the lights just before said patient would fire its fake heart in an explosion of pig’s blood.

Knowing the light was set to a timer he dropped from the rafters and creeped up behind the creature with a -real- knife in hand. Ready to jump scare the creature the moment the lights turned back on.

Or rather that was the plan if said light hadn’t revealed the creature watching him with a curious amusement from behind a pair of glasses on its face.

“Hmm, you know you’d be significantly scarier if you had an actual mask on?” The creature calmly told him.

“The mask gets too hot with the jacket, and the hood combined with refractory contacts usually gives an ominous glow to my darkened face.” He explained. “Problem is the angle you turned around at is blocking the light they would’ve reflected.”

The creature glanced over its shoulder and spotted a small red light before leaning out of the way as it turned back to Jon. “Oh, I can see why that would be scary to turn around to.”

“Yeah… I’m guessing you’ve got dark vision?” He grimaced.

The creature nodded before adjusting his glasses. “Doesn’t help with my nearsightedness though.”

“Right…” He sighed.

This was when Noctis dropped between the two of you and proceeded to scream in an inhuman way that, while he couldn’t see Noctis’s face, he could see several tendrils erupting from it in a spread pattern.

He could also see the creature literally jump out of its own skin turning into what looked like a human shaped spaghetti monster with stripes and several mouths.

While mildly surprised by this, he found himself more concerned with the revelation that, (He used me as a distraction.)

“S-sir Noctis?!” The creature yelped, upon recognizing its terrorizer.

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(Sir Noctis?) He blinked, giving said Nightmarian a curious look.

Noctis rolled his eyes. “Bogeymen are technically my species knights… or a darker order of them if we had them anyway.” With that clarified Noctis turned his attention back to the creature. “And this guy is basically a bureaucrat of my species.”

“I am far more than that!” The other Nightmarian(?) protested. “I am a field bureaucrat!”

Noctis pinched the bridge of his nose. “Put your skin back on, and count yourself lucky I disabled the camera for this room.”

The bureaucrat blinked before remembering he’d leapt out of his skin, and muttered a bashful, “How embarrassing…” as he climbed back into it in a feat of physical flexibility that no human was capable of.

“Do all of your species have collapsible skeletons?” He asked, more curious than anything else.

“We’re technically invertebrates.” Noctis answered, though his tone of voice said it was more to divert attention from what Jon figured was a social faux pa amongst the Nightmarians than an actual interest in answering. “We don’t actually have bones. The places that look like they have bone structures are actually over developed muscle mass where flexibility was traded for durability.”

“Is that something you can turn on and off?” He wondered, some part of his mind otherwise viewing Nightmarians as land octopi in human shape.

“Sort of?” Noctis frowned, as if having to think about it. “My brother has a lot of those dense muscles that he can’t make very flexible, but he layers himself in two treating them like a retractable exoskeleton. Though since that’s like half of his body mass, even when he tries to be flexible he’d barely pass as a flexible human.”

“Rather than a triple jointed contortionist like you?”

“Eh, I’ve got hands and that’s more than enough for me.” Noctis shrugged as if it didn’t matter one way or another.

“Sorry about that.” The bureaucrat told them, once more appearing passibly human with their fake skin and glasses. “Now then, as I was saying-”

“You haven’t said anything. You’ve only screamed like a five year old after their first nightmare.” Noctis pointed out dryly.

The bureaucrat huffed, but ultimately let the jab go. “I’ve come to inquire why you’ve seen fit to abandon your duties on Halloween? Arguably the most important night of our branch’s year!”

“I haven’t abandoned my duties.” Noctis dismissed with a roll of his eyes. “In case you haven’t noticed we’re in a haunted house and I’ve been scaring people -adults and children- all night. And given how I wasn’t given a kid needing my… intervention.” Jon’s more monstrous company rotated his head as if forcibly suppressing something before continuing. “Then that means I’m on standby for the night.”

The bureaucrat adjusted their fake glasses. “While that may be the case you cannot simply up and disappear like this without justifiable reason. Especially not since-”

“Since what?” Noctis growled, pinning the other Nightmarian to the wall via their throat.

“Since, since you’re still… on probation…” The bureaucrat gasped out.

Noctis snarled before tossing the other Nightmarian to the ground and spitting out, “Fine, I’ll waste my night back at the Bog.”

A tense silence fell over all three of them before turning a glare onto Jon. “Well?! You’re the one who summoned me, send me back!”

With a frown at the Nightmarian he did just that, causing Noctis to disappear in a swirl of shadows.

“I’m sorry about that.” The other Nightmarian apologized. “Noctis has always been somewhat… temperamental. Especially when it comes to the proper procedure for this sort of thing…”

“Yeah… You know I’m the one who brought him here, right?” He asked, if only to make sure Noctis’s… irritability wasn’t made worse by this all being blamed on the summons.

“Yes, he’s summoned quite frequently as the local Bogeyman, but staying out on Halloween night when he knows he’s supposed to be ready for disaster is completely on him.” The bureaucrat argued.

While he wasn’t entirely sure about that given how Noctis had warned him both now and during his initial summoning that Halloween was his busiest time of the year. He was also miffed enough at the Nightmarian for yelling at him to not see it as worth fighting.

“Regardless, I do have my own duties I must get back to so I’ll be taking my leave as well.” The Bureaucratic Nightmarian informed him, before promptly collapsing into a boneless pile and fading into his own shadow.

“Well… That was fun.” He sighed, running a hand down his face before looking around the room. “Better fix the cameras before”

This was of course when all of the lights killed out.

The sound of a palm meeting a face followed shortly after.

Running his hand down his face in frustration, he couldn’t help but growl out, “Cheshire if this is you jinxing me, I’m going to stab you the next time I see you.”

A laugh that easily could’ve been just his imagination was his only answer, at least until the screaming and gunshots began.

“Right… stabbing the eldritch horror the next time I see it.”