A Pumpkin-Head (Author: MidbossMan)

Ah... Only one type of creature looks into a pool of water and sees a carved, smiling jack-o-lantern smiling back at them. The orange pumpkin that forms your head wore an expression with triangular, smiling eyes and a wide, zig-zagged smile, looking utterly cheery. You strived every waking day to recalibrate your life and somehow match the mood your face persistently held, and yet, it grew harder every Halloween season to find anything worth smiling about. Your floppy peasant's hat and ragged peasant shirt hung pathetically across your scrawny scarecrow body, with its straw forming a layer like flesh. Underneath all that straw were the gnarled vines that composed your true body. What would it be like to wear anything nicer this peasant gear? You'd often wondered, as you saw all manner of player characters in Halloween event gear coming at you with swords, cudgels, clubs, spears, and... basically every type of close-range weapon in hand.

... Halloween... The one most important word you knew.

It was the only time you ever lived and the only time you died. The life of a pumpkin-head is a brief and tortuous one. Slowly, ever so slowly, you recalled it all from the beginning. When the Halloween season started, you'd be placed into a cave area like this one. People would search these treasure troves all over the world as you knew it. When they found you, they'd beat you to with sticks. You could talk, but it was no use; once people spotted you, they wouldn't stop until they'd beaten you from full HP to zero.

Why couldn't you run from them?

What did you have that they wanted so badly?

As you struggled to recall the answers, you remembered the right resource: your character sheet. Your wits weren't failing you just yet... you could still count on your intellect. Speaking of your intellegence, how high was it, anyway?

Level 1 Halloween Pumpkin-Head
Monster, Plant, Explicit
Experience to level up - 100
Attributes:
Strength 2 | Dexterity 1 | Stamina: 40
Charisma: 30 | Manipulation: 28 | Appearance: 10
Intelligence: 28 | Perception: 20 | Wits: 20
Skills:
Identification (Skill/Spell Books)
Curse removal (Skill/Spell Books)
Feats:
Treasure Monster (Books, Ultra-Rare): This monster spawns skill and spell texts when struck by a close range attack. There is a ten-second timer between allowed spawns, although damage can still be sustained. The level of the text varies depending on the level of the one striking it, although the rarity is preset by the feat itself.
Immobile: This monster cannot change move from its current position by its own power. It can still move its body, but cannot change its location. It can be moved by forces besides itself.
Weapon Restriction (Total): Cannot equip or be equipped with weapons.
Elemental Resist (High): This monster greatly minimizes damage from all elements.
MP regeneration (High): This monster automatically recovers MP at a high rate.
Buff/Debuff Spell Resist (Total): This monster's stats cannot be buffed or debuffed by spells.
Heal Resist (Total): This monster cannot be healed by any means other than leveling up.
Spells:
Sphere of Fear: Casts an AoE spell around the user with distance and effect based on Intelligence. This spell lowers defense and has a chance to terrify based on Intelligence. There is a cooldown on this spell's usage that is lowered based on the Wits stat.
Sphere of Fire: Casts an AoE fire spell around the user with distance and effect based on intelligence. There is a cooldown on this spell's usage that is lowered based on the Wits stat.
Phantom Hands: Creates a pair of free-floating hands that act with Strength, Dexterity, and Stamina directly translated from the user's Intelligence stat. The summoner's MP will be drained as long as they are in use. They will vanish either when dismissed by the summoner or killed, or when the summoner runs out of MP or is killed.

You quickly began to wish that you hadn't looked at the character page. Suddenly, the specifics of your powers and limitations came flooding back to you... Each and every detail amongst them was cursed.

What was the reason you couldn't run from people or choose a less conspicuous place to hide than the caves that acted as treasure troves for players? Oh, that's right! You're rooted to the ground. Running from your neck to your groin is a thick stake, pinning you into the dirt or the cave floor, as the case may be. You'd tried using Phantom Hands to move it before, but to no avail... Whatever twisted god had created you had decided that you were doomed to stay in one place for all of eternity. You're almost no different than a scarecrow object, although you're (slightly) more expressive when you flail your arms, legs, or head back and forth. Unfortunately, doing so makes you makes the monster part even more evident, as though the giant pumpkin head wasn't doing enough.

With no fingers, though, you'd have no way to craft anything and no way to actually equip a weapon... well, except for one workaround. Your phantom hands could help you with holding weapons for short periods of time, if you felt like using your MP stabbing at well-equipped adventurers with whatever makeshift weapon was lying around. Protip: if it was any good, somebody else would have picked it up by now.

Your dexterity couldn't be any lower. Your strength was about as bad... slapping somebody with a floppy hand made of pine-straw and vines was about as useless as an attack could get. Your ridiculously high stamina was only good for one thing: acting as a sturdy pinata for lucky players.

Why were players so damn horny for the idea of beating you with every close-range weapon they could get their hands on? Of course! You're a living tome dispenser. Every time you're struck, by any weapon, no matter how strong or weak, you'll produce a magic or skill tome. In some senses, this makes you about the most popular mob monster there is. People always run at you with a smile and laugh when they see you! You could take very little solace from that fact, considering that once they got within arms length, all you could manage to do was cast a couple of spells over and over in a loop until your long-winded , surrounded by useful books you'd bled all over the ground.

Sphere of Fire and Sphere of Terror, combined with your decent intelligence stat, ought to be plenty, right? Sure, until you're facing down smart players equipped with terror-resisting amulets and fire-resistant armor. If they packed enough resistance, you were honestly better off trying to tickle them to with Phantom Hands than anything else.

You'd looked at this sheet so many times, hoping to find some ray of hope. You had your intellect. You had your wits. There had to be a way out of your role in life! Yet every time, the results had been exactly the same...

... Except, this time, they weren't, were they? The candles inside your eyes momentarily brightened and your zig-zagging mouth expanding its grin, dripping pumpkin-goo across your shirt as you eagerly scanned your sheet again. Something in that last patch had changed you! Was there anything useful?!

Treasure Monster (Books, Ultra-Rare):

Oh, for the love of all that's plump and orange! They'd increased the power of the tomes you drop! With guaranteed, ultra rare drops, pumpkin-hunting season was going to be more brutal than ever! Had they given you anything to offset that? Maybe they'd made you a stronger version of the event monster, to punish greedy players? Maybe you were a raid boss?! Slowly, you realized they'd added something else... But it didn't seem like you were likely to be punishing anyone with it.

"Explicit"

... The gods gave you a dick? What was that supposed to accomplish?! Grumbling, you swiped at your pants with your bushy, fingerless "hands," trying to hit the groin of your typically shapeless pants to figure out what you'd been endowed with. Finally, you felt it... a very erect plant tendril, growing out from amidst your pine straw. Hitting it felt... Unusually stimulating! Maybe this wasn't a bad update? At least if you were going to be beaten to this Halloween, you could derive some masochistic arousal from it!

...

You spent what felt like half an hour, trying to figure out the right way to hit it to generate some pleasurable feeling. About halfway in, you confirmed: there's no right way to beat your manhood with hands made of coarse, wiry straw. You'd come up with an idea, shrugging the shoulders of your shirt down with some efforts so that you could use the cloth of your sleeves instead. It was little better. You forgot just how gross and coarse your rough-spun garment truly was. So great. You'd been given a stiffy that you can't even take care of. Would it be worth summoning Phantom Hands to whack you off? That'd be pretty hilarious... the adventurers all show up to beat the treats out of you and you're sitting there with no MP in a cave full of whatever passes for jizz given your new equipment.

The thought infuriated you. You found your words again: "Son of a bitch!" There they were. You were actually quite fluent in human speech... You remembered that you'd been born into this world with a number of fun, Halloween themed one-liners, but you'd fell out of using them a long, long time ago. Nobody really appreciated that colorful monologue and when your only words had started becoming some kind of meme between all of the players, you'd started using your ghostly pumpkin-head voice to practice various insults instead.

At any rate, you'd wasted too much time trying and failing to enjoy your useless new dick. There ought to be something else different, unless adding a sexual organ to you was somebody's idea of a joke.

Identification (Skill/Spell Books)
Curse removal (Skill/Spell Books)

You'd gained skill in identifying and removing curses on skill and spell books. Well, whoop-dee-doo! What were you supposed to do with that? You were plenty intelligent enough to read the books, but unless someone wanted to helpfully hold one in front of your face and flip through the pages for you, you'd be stuck with the same three spells for your entire life. In fact, you hated the very sight of the tomes, which you associated with intense, blunt- trauma. No thanks. You didn't think you'd be translating any books for anyone or removing their curses any time soon.

By this point, you'd started to feel you were going mad. Was any of this really new? What was the point of any of it? Even with your above-average monster logic, you couldn't come up with a blasted thing. Growling, you decided you'd ask another pumpkin for some kind of tips.

Wait... That's what's been off this whole time. This is a pumpkin-head's cave in the Halloween event area, true...

But you're the only pumpkin-head here.

"This patch has us a few pumpkins short of a patch! Ha ha ha ha he he he he he he-"

You really were going crazy! The idea of a lonely, one-pumpkin isolation had driven you there. You slapped yourself with your useless straw hand, sending pumpkin seeds flying from your mouth and risking catching your hand on fire (not that it'd hurt much- elemental resistance was one of your few boons). Annoyingly, a shiny, blue, glowing skill book flew out and plopped across the floor of your cave, skidding to a stop roughly at its mouth and landing with the pages open. If just you were a little closer! At least you'd have something to read while you waited for adventurers to show up.

Huh... On that note, the Halloween event area was usually buzzing from the moment you spawned. Could someone really have cleared out the whole cave and left just you? What were you, spoiled or something? With puzzlement not matching your cheerfully smiling face, you spun your head 360 degrees to survey the whole cave... Nothing! No signs of battle. No burst pumpkins. No dropped items indicating that players had too much inventory and had started carelessly littering the floor with it. It was as though you'd been alone from the moment you spawned.

Was this also related to the patch? What, were the gods scaling back this year? Come on, guys, it's Halloween. You kind of hated your existence, but this was the only time of the year you got to do anything! Confused, you checked your internal clock... maybe it was still a few hours till the event begins and they're doing some kind of set-up? Maybe-

5:32 PM EST | Saturday, May 1st

...

You clutched both hands to your head and shook your pumpkin back and forth. You, a single pumpkin head with a dick and ultra-rare tomes, had been spawned out of season in a pumpkin-head cave. What were you supposed to make of this? The answers were out there somewhere...

... And you'd probably never get them. After all, you can't move, silly pumpkin! You'll probably just sit in this cave until your head rots and flies take to it. By the time Halloween comes around, the adventurers will discover a moist, smelly soup of collapsed pumpkin rinds, pine straw, and even stinkier clothing where you used to be. You wondered if your stamina would still be 40 as a rotten pumpkin-head. The candles inside your head began to dull as you felt yourself quit thinking... Maybe you should try hitting your dick some more? There was always the option of making your Phantom Hands do it.

As if in cosmic protest of this idea, a noise came from outside: a clash of steel on steel! Combat! On one hand, as soon as whoever out there knew you were in here and full of spell-books, you'd probably see both swords turn on you simultaneously. On the other hand, even getting whacked to was starting to seem pretty good.