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A new candy store is giving free promotional candy to try and attract new customers. At first, it’s delicious; it’s easily one of the best candies you’ve ever had. Only, within twenty four hours of eating your first piece, you begin to have extreme tooth pain that can last for up to a whole day. It feels like a cavity, but a trip to the dentist reveals nothing strange. It just hurts. While the pain eventually fades, you’ll remember how much it hurt. Is your drive for Halloween Candy dented or are you still gearing up for more?
Uneducated though Leiko was, the 20-year-old should have known better than to accept candy from strangers. Granted, the candy was part of some new store’s opening event and was freely being given to anyone who came to claim some, so the circumstances weren’t typical. Who would have known that promotional goods being offered to the public would have caused such trouble? Especially in the form of sweets that tasted so divine?
It all started one October morning when the blonde had been scaling, darting, and leaping through the city, practicing his parkour. He admired the hints of Halloween winking at him through windows and waving at him from trees. Spider webs with spiders, fluttering ghosts, arching black cats, broom-riding witches, jolly skeletons, bloody zombies, ominous gravestones, and more all indicated the time of year and the celebration to come with it. This was the time when children's mouths began to water with the promise of candy to be given out to them by friends, families, teachers, and neighbors.
Leiko's stomach rumbled at the thought, for he hadn't had anything to eat since he'd woken. The memory of Halloween was very fond for him because even though his costumes hadn't been very elaborate, he had still been able to dress up and participate in the annual trick-or-treating of his peers regardless of his own state of poverty. He had usually taken whatever he'd been able to find in the nearest recycling or dumpster – old, torn cloth, cardboard boxes, styrofoam, pieces of plastic – and created some crude outfit out of them. In past years, he had managed a patchwork monster, a rectangular robot, a multicolored alien, and - at one point, when he'd been lucky enough to find most of a whole bedsheet - a ragged ghost.
Of course he had quit the practice once he had deemed himself too old for such childish cheer, but the nostalgia and hunger that bombarded him now caused him to entertain taking it up yet again. He wasn't even a teenager anymore, much less a kid. But he was mistaken for a child so often due to his height, body type, and features that Leiko didn't think it would have been too difficult to pass himself off as one for trick-or-treating. The fact that it would be night and he could have a costume to conceal himself under would be helpful as well.
On his way to go digging for supplies in the trash bin of the nearest craft store, however, the homeless young man came across a cluster of people crowded around the entrance of a shop he hadn't remembered being there before. Upon closer inspection and eavesdropping, Leiko was able to gather that the hullabaloo centered around the opening of a new candy store and the promotional, free sweets it was giving away as samples of their wares.
Naturally, Leiko wasn't about to pass up free candy. He stopped to wait patiently in line for a sample of his own. He figured the store must have been pretty confident to have been opening and advertising its wares around this time of year when it would have to compete with all the cheaper stores selling halloween candy. When he finally obtained his promotional candy, unwrapped the piece, and popped it into his mouth, however, he understood why. It was the best piece of candy he had ever had the privilege of tasting before. And the texture was delightful! The other people who had each gotten their own piece also agreed. If all the candies the store sold were as beloved as this one, it was sure to be a hit.
The young man immediately continued on his way to the craft store dumpster, picking up speed. He concluded that if he had gone back into the line for samples immediately, he would be recognized. But if he waited a few hours and went dumpster diving for costume materials in the meantime, he might have been able to make it back in time for them to forget him and give him another piece. He just had to make sure it was before it got dark since it was likely they would stop giving samples by then.
By the time Leiko made it to his destination, something was horribly wrong. His tooth had begun to hurt terribly and nothing seemed to be able to alleviate it. He tried to check in a mirror, but saw no cavity, no piece of leftover candy, nothing to indicate what might have been causing him pain. It hurt so bad that he ended up having to curl up in a corner of the alleyway and wait it out, getting up only every now and then to find a drinking fountain or use a public toilet.
Hours and hours passed. Leiko lost the desire to return to the candy store for more samples even if he could. He couldn't have been sure that the promotional candies had been the cause of his agony, but he wasn't willing to risk the chance. He slept in order to avoid dwelling on the pain.
Eventually, the pain subsided and the young man couldn't have been more relieved. He hadn't been certain it would ever leave him and had been considering somehow extracting the whole tooth itself if it solved his problem. Nevermind that he had no money to see a dentist, much less get a tooth extracted. Now, though, he had none of those worries. Instead, he celebrated the disappearance of his pain by once again by attempting to create a Halloween costume for himself.
Leiko knew he could have easily just used his senshi outfit as his costume. But aside from the danger of his Chaotic energy signature advertising, he was a Dark Mirror Senshi, that uniform wasn't all that creative an idea and it took the fun out of making his own. When Halloween night finally came around, it saw the short blonde in a costume portraying as a terrifying piece of wrapped candy made of cardboard and garbage bags. After all, what could have been more frightening to sweet-lovers than a toothache-causing, cavity-making, tempting piece of delicious candy?
Inspired by his experiences, Leiko was pleased with his concept. And wary though he was of the new candy store, he was not in the least deterred from passing himself off as a trick-or-treating kid and collecting all the neighborhood treats he could.
((Started 2/17/2018, finished 2/21/2018))
