Prompt
Event Prompt 1 of ??? You come home one afternoon to find a package waiting for you in the mailbox. It’s a small parcel with only the image of a smiling, friendly jack-o-lantern where a sender’s address should be. When you open the package, a porcelain pumpkin bearing the same smile as the sender’s image falls into your palm. The only other thing that you can find in the package is a small business card with the name Perniciousa inscribed in gold lettering. When you google the name, nothing comes up but you’re pretty sure you recall seeing a new store pop up with that name on the outskirts of the shopping district of Destiny City. It must be some sort of advertisement for the holiday season - neat! The store doesn't look quite open yet but hopefully it will be in time for the holiday!

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Anyone who makes use of this prompt is allowed to save the little porcelain pumpkin for display! Besides, who knows what secrets it may hold!


Owen wasn't expecting any kind of a package in the mail today - actually, he wasn't expecting anything this week or this month, and he knew his Mom would have let him know if she was expecting anything, because he was usually around more and thus had to sign off on the rare things she had ordered. So when he fetched the mail and found the little package waiting for him, he immediately tried to see who had sent it. Maybe it was a present from Bailey or Daniel?

But when he looked at the sender's address, there was nothing but a sticker of a jack-o'-lantern on it, and he frowned, pushing wavy blue hair out of his face before he shrugged and carried it inside with the rest of the mail. He didn't think about opening it immediately, even though he was curious; there was homework to do, and he wanted to check in with Daniel and make sure he was doing okay (he worried about him almost constantly, given what his family had done), but once that was out of the way and he'd made sure the other boy was... maybe not okay, but still hanging in there, his mind wandered back to the little package he'd found.

Going out to the coffee table where he'd left today's mail, Owen picked the little package up and once again looked it over, trying to see if there was anything particularly suspicious about it, but it just looked like any other package. If so, it was... probably okay, right? He hoped it would be alright, anyway; he always got nervous about anything strange that happened this time of year, and with good reason. Strange things happened in this city around Halloween. (He would never, never, never forget the spiders. Ugh.)

Still, it looked perfectly innocent, so he opened the package up and blinked as a tiny porcelain pumpkin fell out into his head. Well, that was... he didn't know what he had been expecting, but something so harmless in appearance certainly wasn't it. Owen cradled the paperweight... thing... in his palm while he fished around inside the package for anything else, locating only a business card. A business card?

Perniciousa?

Had he seen a place like that around? He wasn't sure, but it did sound familiar. Maybe it was one of those places that hadn't quite opened yet? This was a pretty weird method of advertising, though, if that was all this was. How much money did these little figures cost? How many were they sending around? And why would they send one here? (For that matter, had his friends gotten one of these? Daniel hadn't mentioned anything like that during their phone call, but maybe he should check in with Bailey, or miss Jessie - anyone who might know something about what was going on.)

For now, though, he decided he'd take the pumpkin into his room and put it on his school desk. It'd be safe enough there and his Mom wouldn't ask about where he'd gotten it - for some reason, he didn't think it was a good idea to let her know about it. It probably wasn't a big deal, but he worried about his mother (even now she was always so tired, working so hard, and he refused to trouble her about something as dumb as a little paperweight of an advertisement).

And maybe he'd find time to look into that store once it opened. Not because he was actually curious about what it sold, really - more because he wanted to know how a store that was just starting up could afford to mail out something like this! Maybe they weren't sending them to many people, or maybe whoever was doing this had a lot of money that they could get away with investing. If it was the latter, then why were they opening up a store? He had so many questions!

Word Count: 660