PVP action in the dead Halloween event zone

You'd learned to identify types of battles by their sound- a useless skill, for someone who can't physically move towards or away from battles. Still, you'd learned to do it, because sometimes, being a pumpkin waiting to start casting a loop of two AoE-from-self spells until he's beaten to a mushy, ablaze vegetable pulp gets pretty boring.

Steel on hay? A pumpkin dies today.

Steel on steel? Hey, how's it feel?!

That was your way of laughing at players who were so dumb, they beat the stuffing out of each other trying to monopolize a pumpkin patch around Halloween. This was a PVP enabled area, after all. It wasn't uncommon for especially greedy players to try to snuff everyone else out and claim all the tomes for themselves. It was a pretty stupid idea, though... About four times out of five, another player would swoop in and take all the goodies while they were quarreling. Furthermore, once they started fighting, they couldn't just stop. Not without losing some street cred, which probably mattered, for people who had streets to tread. They'd battle to the **** for an empty, spent pumpkin patch, full of just the drops the thief hadn't thought valuable enough to pick up. Enjoy your patissier skill tomes, suckers!

Ah, making fun of your killers was one of life's simple and only pleasures.

But yes: this was one of those steel on steel battles. Oddly enough, this one was punctuated by dialogue... First, a strong, masculine voice:

"Coward! Only a true coward attacks a man between his shielding rolls!" Groan!

Then, a scoffing, feminine one:

"And only a true idiot expects all of the attacks to come up when he's using his shield skill!" Slice!

"It looks way cooler if you hit my shield some times, Pike...! I'm letting you dodge my hits, so just- fuck off!" Oof!

"Ha ha ha ha! I think it looks cooler when you bleed all over the ground! I'm just playing a thief that's really good at killing you! Get dunked!" Stab!

"This is a fucking RP area, Pike! Pike! Pike- goddammit, I'm gonna report!" Whine!

You heard the telltale groaning noise of a player becoming a corpse: a long-winded bell chime. Soon, the dead player would respawn at town, if nobody revived them. Judging by how she'd treated the guy, you had a feeling that this "Pike" wasn't going to be resurrecting him. She didn't seem to be the empathetic type.

With that ominous thought on your mind, you watched the entrance of the cave as a shadow began to lengthen across its floor, accompanied by the jovial whistling of the lady thief. Next came rummaging; presumably, she was looting the guy's corpse. Pike seemed like the "strip them to their small-clothes" type, judging by the amount of rummaging. Finally, you heard your own **** bells in the form of the telltale "oooooh!" of someone who's just discovered loot in an area where no loot should spawn outside of Halloween.

Normally, this would be followed by the player giddily running in to raid the pumpkin patch. This time, it was instead followed by another exclamation: "HOLY WOW! There's a Mirror Edge (Ultra) tome over here! Hey Guy! Guy! Oh, wait, he just back-to-towned. He he, finder's keepers! Can't wait to see lame-brain's face when I pull that out next time!"

Was she talking to herself? That might be some form of "clan chat," a magical tool players use to communicate over great distances. You'd always hoped you could replicate it somehow... a lot of pumpkins popping off their fire spells at the same time so the humans lost all of their HP at once with no chance to heal would be a lot more survivable than idiots casting at random times. Unfortunately, the pumpkins would remain without a pumpkin's union and continue to be oppressed. Tragic.

What was all the more tragic was the thief's sense of curiosity. Couldn't she be happy with that ultra rare tome you'd given her?! Apparently not, because she was sniffing around in the cave for more. There was no way for a guy like you to hide, so, hoping against hope, you tried a trick you'd tried ten other times before with no success, but which really seemed like it ought to work one of these times. As she peeked her green-hooded head in, you laughed wildly.

"Ha ha! Look at this cool Pumpkin-Head skin I equipped! Pretty neat, huh?!" There was a pumpkin-head cosmetic in the game, dammit! Somebody ought to be fooled by this! Why did they just start attacking every time you said it?!

The dark eyebrows above the thief's surprisingly pretty, almond-shaped brown eyes lowered to a skeptical half-tilt. "Uh... Monster? You know we can all see you have a default red indicator over your head, right? You can't hide as a player. Plus... Even if you could... This is a PVP area. I'd stab you anyways... Well, a PVP and RP area. I'd say some cool stuff as Pike and then stab you."

How informative! But not calming. You were still going to get stabbed. Should you start casting your Terror spell right now?

Maybe not... Surprisingly, the thief entered the cave, sheathing her long, cosmetically blessed silver dagger into a sheath at her side. Disappointingly for your newly arousal-capable plant dick, her form was mostly hidden by a green ranger's cloak. She was no ranger... That cloak was stolen goods, for sure. The fact that she was wearing it while wielding a thief's weapon was like openly bragging about being a player killer. As for the rest of her, the only flesh showing was her tan, lightly freckled flesh about the bridge of her nose and her eyes. Her hands were covered by some smooth, tanned leather gloves and her feet with matching, shin-high boots. You couldn't quite make out her legs, but those black, leather britches she was wearing looked expensive and immaculately maintained (by their previous owner). The scabbard on her belt held her knife, but just as importantly, she carried some expanded inventory pouches, the kind one doesn't get without a lot of play.

Oh! On that note, before she kills you, you probably ought to read her basic player information floating over your head. You could see all of that without using a scan skill. It'd tell you just how bad of kicking you were about to take in your pine-straw excuse for an ass.

Level 16- Pike, the Thief
Player, Forest Elf, Explicit

Level 16? By the sweet, abundantly ripe melon patches of Westermarch, she's a little overqualified, isn't she?! Player-killing RPers must be a pretty lucrative business...

"Say... You haven't cast any spells yet. Are you going to? Do you uh... Do you not have spells, when it's not Halloween? Dude, I didn't even know that you guys spawned when it wasn't event time. I can't believe you're back around already... Must be part of that weird patch they rolled out."

Ah, right... You'd forgotten about the patch for a moment. You laughed in a ghostly chuckle and then told the oddly hesitant thief player that as a Summer Pumpkin-head, you had considered that you may be an endangered species. One of your kind. About to be zero of your kind, once she killed you with that fancy knife work of hers.

This caused her to raise her eyebrows. "Hold up! You're the only one? Oh wow... I think... Holy wow! I've found an Easter egg the programmers just put in! I gotta upload this right away...!" Just like that, the thief's player logged out. You were left staring at the player's uninhabited avatar, as the elf crossed her arms and stared idly about the cave, seeming unconcerned about a single pumpkin-head. She must be set on "stay" mode... a critical tool for anyone leaving their player hidden in a PVP zone. A scheme began to form in your pumpkin brain...

The woman was unplayed. Even at level 16... if she can't use some form of fire resistance, you could kill her. All you had to do was grab her with your Phantom Hands and then cast Sphere of Fire over and over again until she died. Her stabs couldn't come quickly enough to deplete all of your HP and without a player behind her, she'd be too helpless to do something like drink a Fire Resistance potion! You weren't sure if people even carried those around when they weren't hunting pumpkin patches!

... And yet, for some reason, you hesitated. Call it a gut feeling. Call it a misplaced sense of chivalry. The thief was the only player you'd ever met who hadn't beaten you to **** the instant they encountered you... Even if she only saw you as some sort of curiosity, you felt like you wanted to repay her for that. Against all of your survival instincts, you avoided summoning the hands to begin murdering the avatar. You waited for the woman to return.

Thankfully, it didn't take long. Pike's player popped back into the elf's head, announcing her arrival by changing the elf's dour complexion to a smirking, roguish one. "Ha ha! I almost made a completely bone-headed move! The moment I advertise your existence, somebody's gonna come pummel you for skill-books!"

You couldn't help but point out that was a pretty long-winded way of saying that she was going to beat you up now and take your books.

"That's cause I'm not going to."

Now there was a surprise. Over your time as a loot pinata, you'd become convinced that players weren't capable of interacting with you in any way other than that. You asked Pike why she'd decided to defy that basic instinct.

"I mean... If I hit you like forty times, you're dead, right? You'll be the last May Pumpkin-Head or whatever you called yourself. On the other hand, here, like this... you're like a rare trophy nobody else has! Dude, when there's a hidden Easter egg like this, there's some hidden meaning to it. I'm going to figure it all out and post it on the boards before anybody else gets to have a shot at it!"

Ah... So scientific curiosity was the only thing keeping you alive right now, it seemed. It wasn't quite empathy for a lesser creature like you'd been hoping, but you were willing to take it. You didn't know what "board" she was talking about, but you could only assume she meant those ones in town that they post quests on for players. You really wanted to find some way to persuade her not to draw a crowd of adventurers here.

In fact... Your very life now depended on maintaining an air of mystery. This woman needed to believe that you were the most interesting feature of this world she'd ever laid eyes upon. Above all, she needed to not come to understand that the Mirror Edge (Ultra) book she'd acquired was just the tip of the iceberg. You thought to yourself that if she knew she could get about 39 books of similar value, randomly generated, from poking you with her knife and then retreating to a safe distance with some Leap Back skill, she'd definitely do it.

"So, come on! Spill the beans... Or the pumpkin seeds, whatever it is. You're programmed with some funny dialogue or something, right?" You couldn't see her face due to the cloth half-mask hiding it inside the hood of her cloak, but you could tell she was grinning in provocation.

... Being told to tell a joke made it too embarrassing! You thought you were pretty witty for a guy with candles and pumpkin mush where your brains should be, but you couldn't come up with anything. You felt like an embarrassed underclassman being teased by a senior girl.

"Hmm... Nothing? There's gotta be something different about you..."

Yes! It was up to you to prove that to her, and quickly, before the idea of 39 random tomes became significantly more interesting than the great mystery of the pumpkin spawn point!