Prompt
As you head down a very familiar route that you frequent one night, you come across someone giving away free candy corn. Whether you love it or hate it, free is free and you decide to take it home, shoving it in your pocket to be forgotten. Eventually you head to bed, only to be woken up but a soft, high - pitched snarling sound near the foot of your bed. You sit up and find that the candy corn is splayed out across the floor, and among it, in the center of what seems to be a sacrificial circle… Is a knee high gremlin shaped like a candy corn. It sees you and bites you, before scampering away. Before you can catch it, it's disappeared. Sans the strange little bite on your leg, there's no evidence this was anything more than a dream, and by morning the marks are almost completely gone. The only lingering effect is an extreme need to consume sugar for the next twenty four hours.
Rhian was not normally one who took candy from people who were just handing it out on the street --- that wasn't safe, and besides, the kind of candy people felt like giving away was usually the kind that was much too cheap to have any real flavor to it. Still, when she'd been offered the little bag, she hadn't had the heart to turn it away. Oh, she had no intention of eating it, and resolved to throw it away as soon as she got back home, but after shoving it in a side-pocket of her backpack, she didn't really think about it again. Candy corn was candy corn, and even when it was safe it was... at best... forgettable. Maybe she shouldn't have forgotten it, but she did, dropping her backpack by her bed and digging out her psychology textbook to study the evening away, instead.
(She wished she had more people to go out and do things with, but... it probably wasn't safe. So much happened in this city, and some people were safe but some people weren't, and as much as she missed spending time with as many people as possible, helping as many people as possible, it was just... it was better not to. Maybe if she could meet people she wouldn't be afraid of losing to the stupid magic war, but she wouldn't know how to begin doing that when it was a secret magic war.)
Eventually, however --- as she could only study in the quiet for so long before either going half-mad from the silence or falling asleep from the same thing, she found herself dozing off, tipped sideways on her bed. She was brought out of the doze by the sound of something... something snarling? Sitting up and rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Rhian looked around and spotted --- had... had something gotten into that candy corn she'd brought home? It was spilled all over the floor, but in a way that almost made a kind of pattern. And that growling?
Alright, no, her eyes weren't playing tricks on her. That was a tiny monster that looked like an over-sized, vicious piece of candy corn. She squeaked in surprise and it looked her way, hissing and jumping at her, and despite her attempts to ward it off it sank surprisingly-sharp teeth into her leg. It burned, and Rhian grabbed her pillow to swat at the creature, driving it off and out her slightly-open window. What was --- no no no nonononono she didn't want bitten by strange monsters again, no, no, last time it was spiders and she didn't want that again and no--- scrabbling at her leg with panicked fingers, she tried to examine the bite, noticing the little teeth marks as she tried not to panic. This was--- no. No no no no not again---
... Sitting up with a jolt, Rhian noticed the sun streaming through her window, and she glanced around with wide eyes. Had she fainted? Was it all a dream? Bending over her leg, she checked where the creature had bitten her, and saw what might have been a bite, but might have just been a spot she'd pressed her leg against the corner of her textbook, slumped over it like she had been. She felt fine, at least --- no hallucinations, no pain or sickness. So maybe... maybe it had just been a really weird dream?
Except... she could really, really go for some candy. Where was that tub of cotton candy she kept around for craving emergencies?!? It had to be here somewhere, and she needed it now. She just might die if she couldn't get it in the next five minutes!
Word count: 632
