Young Writers Society

A crack of thunder tears out of the speakers, followed by the lightning-like flash of strategically placed lights vaguely above the gathered masses of costumed guests. Signs promising 'Frightful Fun' and 'Deadly Delights' hang from chains made to look rusty and decrepit above the entrances of attractions of all sorts. Roller coasters hurl screaming passengers high up above the crowded paths on tracks cleverly designed to look unkept and ready to fall at any moment.

Things are all truly delightful at the infamous Scare Fest, a yearly event for fright-loving Halloween enthusiasts. Costumes are required, scares are requested, and screams are encouraged!

Or, so the add reads.

This year, there is something brewing behind the scenes. Even the careful calculations of the cautious directors of this elaborate show could not have hinted at the presence of a pair of seemingly innocuous guests, a pair who don't at all belong. With wristbands shackling them to the park and the hour perpetually held at twilight, will this unlikely duo of monsters be able to find and destroy the real evil before time runs out?

When Lorcan opened his eyes, he was greeted by darkness and pale, fluorescent lights. He strained his eyes to get a good look at his surroundings. After a minute of staring up at an old, faded ceiling, his eyes finally adjusted to the unfamiliar lighting.

He unsteadily got to his feet. He had been laying up against an ancient-looking wall - he couldn't put an exact age to it. But, despite its age, it had a group of cords running through it; they were all bunched together a few feet from where Lorcan was now standing.

He took a step forward.

And immediately walked right into a wooden display.

Wincing in pain - and stumbling back into the wall behind him - Lorcan barely had the time to realize that the display was a fluorescent, ghastly but cartoonish ghost before he heard the sound of something mechanical chugging along. He sunk further back into the shadows; he wished he could cover himself in the darkness, but he didn't want to risk running out of magic if he was here alone.

A moment later, a cart full of human children slowly rolled into the room on tracks Lorcan hadn't noticed when he first got up. They were holding neon-colored guns. Some of them were shooting at the ghosts; others were just clutching them tightly as they tried their best to look away from the room. Every time one of the targets was seemingly hit - despite no bullets being fired - the wooden displays fell back.

The cart was almost out of the room.

Lorcan let himself breath a sigh of relief-

-only for it to be cut short by a young boy yelling in excitement when he noticed Lorcan. He pointed at him and tried to shoot the gun at him - a speck of red light temporarily blinding Lorcan's sensitive eyes. But the cart left the room before any of the other kids could notice; no one else pointed guns at him.

Lorcan held his breath for a moment.

Finally letting it out a second later, he stepped out from behind the display. He suddenly became aware of what had been bugging him all along - his clothes were wrong. He was wearing a white, v-neck shirt, black pants with countless belt straps wrapped around them, and a black, long-sleeved jacket. The final touch was the hat he felt was perched on the top of his head.

Lorcan carefully removed it.

It was a pirate hat.

Lorcan ran his tongue over his fangs and sighed. If Juniper was here, she'd be laughing at the joke - he was a vampire pirate, just like his namesake.

...Well, he didn't know where he was right now, and the clothes seemed to be important for fitting in. Reluctantly putting the hat back on, he decided to venture farther into the building.

Kate was awoken by the cackling laughter of a witch right out of the cheesiest cartoon to ever disgrace a television screen. She hopped to her feet and was immediately accosted by the gleeful face of a long-nosed witch in a pointed hat, which headbutted her as it jumped out.

Hollow plastic thumped against her not-hollow skull, and before she had time to process that, there was a series of fearful, then delighted shrieks from children around the bend. The chugging grind of metal thumped on behind the cheesy 'spooky' music that played as a cart full of three kids with laser-pointing fake-guns and one tired-looking adult rounded the bend.

One of the kids squealed something incomprehensible when he saw Kate and started aiming his little gun at her. She flipped him off and ducked behind the witch's cauldron, which had a little crawlspace behind it.

Kate got on her hands and knees and crawled between the light-blocking curtains right into a mud puddle. She wrinkled her nose and got up. Throngs of people in tacky costumes passed by without noticing her on a well-lit path. The sound of screams of glee and terror pierced the air in a steady roar, only fading and rising like a little kid was messing with the sound equipment at a music festival for death metal fans.

Kate wrinkled her nose as she brushed the mud off her own tacky costume with....oh hell no.

Her hands were coated in glitter. Her arms, which were completely exposed, continued this awful trend. She had a corset pulled tight around her waist with nothing under it to keep the laces in the back from digging into her back, and this stupid puffy black skirt with the sewn-in, cheap purple petticoats was clasped around her artificially smaller-than-usual waist with a single cheap plastic button.

On top of it all, there was a set of leaf-like wings sewn to the back of the corset on either side of the laces.

Fucking. Hell. No.

Lorcan knew that the smartest idea would be to follow the cart that had just rolled by him, but he wasn't sure people were supposed to be in this place outside of the carts. Everything else here was a decoration; he was the only person wandering through its halls.

...Which probably ruled out going the way the cart had come from, too.

Lorcan let out a sigh. He was staring to get an idea, but he didn't really like it. He looked around and listened. No one was coming. No one would notice if the person lingering beside the wooden ghost suddenly vanished; no one would question what took his place.

He closed his eyes and tapped into the magic.

The magic provided by his contract was strained. He could feel a little bit of it. That wasn't a surprise - there was always a little ember of magic that remained. But what he could tap into was the magic all around him. It wasn't enough to conjure darkness, but it was enough to make a simple little shift.

He just hopped it would be enough to let him keep his clothes when he transformed back.

He funneled the magic around him into his own little ember of magic. Once he had what felt like an inferno settle into his chest, Lorcan's form shifted. It grew smaller and more compact. The clothes were lost to fur. The shift was so sudden that Lorcan almost went plummeting to the ground - he hated shifting whenever he forgot to get low to the ground - but a few frantic flaps of wings later, Lorcan was steady in the air.

He followed the path the cart had taken.

When he finally caught up to it at the entrance of the building, he was met with a few surprised shrieks. No one ever like seeing bats here, and they certainly didn't like big ones. Lorcan rushed out before the people in uniform's threats of calling something "animal control" could be fulfilled.

The magic was weaker outside. He wasn't going to be able to change into his other form if he didn't do it now, and he doubted a bat could easily get around this place. It looked like there were humans no matter where he looked - animals weren't something people were fond of.

He urged his body to switch forms again. He thought he was alone; he had flown back behind the building. But when he suddenly wasn't a bat and was stumbling to get his balance again, he bumped into a muddy, sparkling (?) girl who was standing near him.

And he hadn't bumped into her from the back - or the front, or the side. It was a weird mix of the last two. It was the kind of angle that let her see him going from bat to seemingly normal human without him noticing her until he started stumbling.

He stared at her, blue eyes wide in horror.

...At least he was wearing clothes this time?

Kate shoved the guy who stumbled into her away. "Fuck off!"

As he stumbled once again, but this time in a more favorable direction, she got a proper look at him.

Oh, that's rich.

A fucking pirate costume. Not even a good one. The only stiffening in the weak-ass fabric was soft, floppy foam and of course there were gold embellishments. Whatever glitter-licking dumpter-dweller designed that thing deserved to get keelhauled.

Even after Lorcan steadied himself, he took another step back. He wanted to give her all of the distance she needed; the last thing he wanted to do was get into an argument.

"I'm sorry," he apologized. "I wasn't watching where I was going."

Maybe she hadn't noticed him while he was a bat. It seemed unlikely, considering how he had been coming at her, but it would explain why she wasn't questioning how a bat had turned into something that was decidedly not a bat.

He nervously ran his tongue over his fangs. Everyone here were in costumes. If he was lucky, she would assume his fangs - which she had to have seen during his apology - were just part of the costume. He didn't know why a pirate would randomly have fangs, but he wasn't going to question it unless she pressed him on it.

"No fucking shit," she said, scowling at him, then her muddy costume, then him again, "Let's cut through the crap. I saw your batty little stunt there, is that normal here or did you also not get to pick your shitty-ass costume."

She was sick of all the 'I'm totally from here' bullshit that happened at the beginning of half of these stupid-ass god-games. Getting that shit out of the way was the best way to get to the part where she was back to planning a surprise for her and Tallulah's anniversary. Not that Tallulah knew what an anniversary was, and Kate wasn't even sure how long they'd been together. Time was weird on Neverland, but whatever. It was more of a surprise that way.

He faltered.

She had seen him switch forms. He wouldn't have called it a stunt, but he didn't really feel like explaining everything about magic and contracts right now. He was getting too overwhelmed by everything else that was going on.

"I didn't," he finally admitted. He felt a strange mix of relief and worry wash over him. He was glad he wasn't the only one in this situation right now, but he wasn't sure what he thought of her right now. They had only just met, but he was being eerily reminded of a much more extreme version of Hero.

He glanced down at his costume.

"Whoever did seems to like irony," Lorcan guessed. If it wasn't that, then it was one of the most unlikely coincidences in his entire life.

"How's that ugly piece of trash ironic for you?" she asked incredulously.

That guy didn't carry himself like a pirate. He didn't talk like one. He didn't walk like one. He probably couldn't name a single basic sailing knot.

Lorcan suddenly found the ground to be incredibly interesting. He actually didn't mind the outfit all that much - he just didn't like the hat.

"I was named after a pirate," he admitted. He didn't add that the pirate was also a vampire. He wanted to avoid comparisons between vampires and himself for as long as he possibly could - even though he knew someone was bound to bring it up eventually. "At least, I think I was. He might have just been a sailor."

"There's a big difference between 'just a sailor' and 'pirate'," Kate pointed out.

He felt his cheeks get turn red and hot.

"...He was a character in a story," Lorcan said. "I never read the book he was in, so I don't know if he was a pirate or not. But the series had pirates in the title..."

Kate crossed her arms, not sure if she should be insulted. In the end, she decided she didn't give a fuck. There were better things to worry about.

"Where the fuck are we?" she asked, more in general than anything. This sharp-toothed moron didn't look like he knew anything about what was going on right now.

He finally looked back up, the color fading from his cheeks.

Then he scanned the place they were.

He hadn't seen a place exactly like this before, but little bits of familiarity tugged at the very edges of his memory. He had seen builds like this before, back before he knew it was called a build and that it wasn't just a forgotten structure left in the middle of a sprawling woods. He had ventured into them three times before: once on his own, once with Second, and once with Second and Hero. The builds had all been empty, but there had been food to raid the second and third times, and comfortable piles of somewhat dusty but soft toys to sleep on all three times.

He hadn't eaten any of the food then, of course. His tongue ran over his fangs again; he had to look into the forest surrounding the builds for food. But Second and Hero hadn't minded all the strange, sugary and greasy concoctions the builds had to offer - not until their stomachs hurt that night, at least.

He tried to remember the names he had seen on the faded signs outside the builds. He remembered something called a carnival, but the structures here weren't the same.

"We're in an amusement park," Lorcan finally guessed. He glanced at the road a short ways away from them, watching as children excitedly ran past while their parents struggled to keep up with them. "...But it reminds me more of a festival with the costumes and activity."

Kate rolled her eyes, "It's a Halloween-themed amusement park, moron. Not even a good one. None of these people gave half a shit about their costumes and I'm fucking drenched in glitter." This shit was never going to get off of her. She'd be sparkly for life. What bullshit.