[OM][Full] The Groundskeeper’s Folly (2/2)

[The Quill]

When the groundskeeper had finished loading the last batch of pumpkins into a low sled that morning, only a few dozen had been left in the patch. These were the malformed, bruised, misshapen and discoloured ones, fit for pumpkin juice but not for decoration. They were not even fit for tonight’s steaming, flavourful soup, spiced with yellow curry, served with a side of cream, and garnished with finely chopped parsley. Too wicked and wayward were they, too crooked inside and out. Had they not been left tonight, their dark purpose might have been avoided...

A stale cold permeated the grounds that morning, a windless chill had laid down the first thin coating of snow along the ridges and edges of the dark garden soil. By midday, a gaggle of students had last passed by the patch, clutching their scarves and breathing hot air into their hands as they hastened into the castle’s warm embrace. Slowly the sky had darkened overhead and all the while the pumpkins in the patch had been left to their own brooding thoughts of deep roots and dense earth. Not before the tolling of the seventh bell did they awake from their deep slumber.

Shallow were the footprints pressed into the earth, no heavier than a roe’s, and difficult to make out in the fading light. Perhaps if Iris Perkins had seen them, she would have made it safely back to the dining hall in time…

—-

TWO Penwick Student(s) or Professor(s) (or one of each) can enter the pumpkin patch, but will need some reason not to be at the dining hall, which is where most would and should be. This thread takes place in simultaneously with the dinner and the scene at the clockwork cafe. You can only be in one of these places at once.

When entering the pumpkin patch, you may notice that it is entirely empty. You may hear or see some movement in a low, nearby shrub which you may choose to investigate. If you choose to investigate, the act of investigation will be rolled for using d20 + your character’s intelligence where a high score will result more information being revealed.

No rolls are needed to know that the patch is empty, or to observe that there is something in the shrubs, both are plainly obvious to anyone with a pulse.

You’re at liberty to try a different investigation action based on the text above, but whether this will be fruitful…

This is entry point 3/3 into the same narrative. These entry points will later converge into a single thread. Consider this the starting area. The other entry points are:

• In the Dining Hall at Penwick (Entry point for Penwick students)
• At the pumpkin patch (Entry point for Penwick students or Professors)
• In the clockwork cafe (Entry point for adult characters)

[Santiago Corvesso]

date. october 31st, 2025.  tagged.  @enid pryce
listening to. i'm a robot by snow wife
investigation roll. 23 (16+7)

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Santiago knew that Enid wanted to be in the Dining Hall in their costumes. She loved when they could dress up and parade around the room in social necessity to showcase their status as nepotism babies while at Penwick. Santiago hated it, it was a new sensation dealing with Rafael and he still wasn't sure how exactly to feel about the whole ordeal, especially after their talk. He'd fill in Enid on what happened later, she didn't need to feel the need for vengeance when Santi wasn't quite sure what to make of it exactly.

He hated all this familial relationship and obligation that weighed heavy on his shoulders. The gardens didn't do this, the soil tilled answered back when he offered worms or fertilizer to help provide it with nutrients. There was a clear solution to everything, no room for worrying about feelings.

A smile back at Enid as he pulled her along into the pumpkin patch, the chill of the air biting down as he offered his girlfriend his scarf to help her keep as warm as he could possibly help it. " Thanks baby, the goblins were saying there were pumpkins being left for disposal. I need it bad for my compost and for a couple Greenhouse projects. " He offered a genuine smile through the darkness, a flash of a dazzling gleam before they made it to their goal and Santi began to rub his hands together through his mitts in absolute excitement.

Now, all they needed to do was grab a few pumpkins and they would be set.

" Wait, why is it empty? " Without skipping a beat, Santiago kneeled down to the pumpking patch and grabbed a handful of soil from the ground and quickly attempted to analyze the smell, the touch, the texture of what he was feeling. His eyes would scan his immediate surroundings for anything that seemed off with the patch itself.

ACTION SUMMARY: SANTI KNEELS DOWN and ATTEMPTS TO ANALYZE THE SOIL / PUMPKIN PATCH.

[Enid Pryce]

Enid had wanted to be something classic. Something ethereal and ominous, like the lady of the lake come again, an elegant omen, a wraith haunting the edges of that glimmering pool, a specter sent to weigh your sins and find you wanting.

And Santi had wanted them to be fucking mushrooms. So they'd compromised.

Her dress was an intricate array of bone-white gauze and lace, with long, cavernous sleeves and a draping hemline that was now dragging ignominiously through the mud and pumpkin debris. Her concession to her boyfriend's whims was perched in her curled up-do like a crown, a silver circlet with a litany mushrooms growing tall and steadfast out of the top of it, and a pale white veil extending from the bottom and obscuring her face from her prying peers and penetrating autumn air in equal measure.

The fervidly cultivated effect was dimmed rather severely, though, by the Mercator purple pea coat she'd been forced to don in deference to the temperature. Lacking usable pockets, she'd secured her wand in an old-fashioned leather holster attached to a belt at her waist. It was more for show than function, carried casually in the way one only can when they've never truly known what it meant to need it. Instead, her hand was occupied with an old brass lantern, the sickly green light emanating from the candle inside charmed to look like it was coming from a glowing green mushroom.

A truly baleful crease had formed between her eyebrows, one Santiago was no doubt intimately familiar with, though could currently be forgiven for missing in it's veil-obscured form. "I don't understand why you can't just buy pumpkins. I'll buy you a hundred pumpkins if it means we go back inside." One of her heels had sunk into the loamy earth, and she excavated it mournfully.

An unseen eye roll greeted Santi's question, missing the actual crux of his question in her mud-induced misery. "Because it's Halloween, Santiago. Obviously, they've picked all the pumpkins." Still, though, they'd come here so Santi could have rotting vegetables for his experiments or whatever, and he could be stubborn when he wanted to be, not unlike Enid herself. The sooner they found some pumpkins, the sooner they could return to the dining hall. In a softer voice, she added, "I'm sure there's got to be some left around here, is it?"

Unwilling to join him crouched in the mud, Enid cast her gaze about for where some groundskeeper might have ditched decaying pumpkins, only for her attention to be pulled to the nearby shrubbery as a soft rustling disturbed the leaves. The wind, she suspected, but she finally relented and pulled her veil up and over the mushrooms. She was fairly certain something was in the shrubs, but in the fading light, it was hard to tell what, exactly. It could be an elusive pumpkin, or a lonesome lost quaffle, or some bereft student's misbehaving familiar. Toddling over on sinking heels, Enid held her lantern aloft, creeping forward for a closer look.

---

Tagging @Santiago Corvesso and @The Quill.

Action: Investigating the shrubs with Inquisitive x2 (and making every horror movie mistake along the way). She rolled a 3, and she is looking for pumpkins. I will let you interpret what that means, however is most fun for you, Quill. I wanted to playtest the abilities, but if this is not in the spirit of the thread and you'd prefer I engage with it as directed, let me know and I will re-roll.

[The Quill]

The black earth crumbled in Santiago's hands, this was good soil, smelling faintly of dew and compost. Perhaps he would be tempted to pocket some of it for whatever growing and potting projects he had going on, no one would miss a few handfuls of dirt, right?

"Wait, why is it empty?"

His voice disturbed the eerie silence that had fallen over the pumpkin patch, but the grounds gave no audible answer. His senses of touch and smell gave no answers either and merely told him what he would already know: what he held in his hands was dirt. Good dirt for growing, but dirt nonetheless. Finding nothing unusual there, the fifth-year looked around.

Investigation Roll: 23
Threshold: 20
Success!

His eyes, having adapted to the dark by now, would make two observations. First and foremost, the slight unevenness of the earth in patches, betraying two pairs of light footprints, disturbed and interrupted in places by other movement, but still clear enough to be traced where they had not mingled with Santiago's and Enid's own. One set of footprints came out of the dark beyond the grounds, moving into the patch. These were small and light footprints, clustered closely together, like that of a small child. The other pair came from the castle, the same way he and Enid had come, and lead into the patch, where they looped back in on themselves, as though someone had been pacing up and down. Then they seemed to change direction all of a sudden, heading further away from the castle and fading away. The last he would be able to see of this pair was near the edge of the pumpkin patch, furthest from the castle, where the ground was too firm to hold the imprints of anyone who had gone that way.

And there he would see it, barely visible from the edge of light caused by Enid's lantern.. Laying on the border between patch and dirt path was something small and white, like a tiny stick. If he would reach for it and take it he would smell tobacco and perhaps even recognize it. It was an unlit Vapour Wand, a small cigarette sold at Huffler's Puffers and not infrequently resold at huge markups by delinquents to gullible young students.

While Santiago used touch, smell, and sight to make his discoveries, Enid instead relied on her hearing. Drawn by the soft rustling in the shrubs she would hold her lantern toward the source of the noise, perhaps expecting a lost hedgehog or a squirrel stuck in the brambles. What she found instead was the very thing they had set out to find in the first place: a pumpkin.

A soft glowing, pulsing light radiated from within, illuminating its fixed, grinning features. Its misshapen surface was discoloured in places by patches of green and its menacing face was roughly carved as though created in haste or with disinterest. It didn't look like it had even been properly hollowed out yet as bits of pumpkin and seeds were spilling out of the corner of its jagged-teeth mouth like drool.

Finding an enchanted jack-o-lantern was nothing too out of the ordinary at Penwick around this time of year, even badly made ones, but Enid's inquisitive mind would notice that this one was behaving very strangely indeed. While most enchanted pumpkins levitated, glowed, and made the ocassional noise to startle unsuspecting first-years, this one moved.

At least, it was trying to. The rustling she had heard was simply the product of the small pumpkin trying again and again to hop forward, but its curled stem had snagged on something in the shrubbery. It was determined to go somewhere, that much was clear, but unless it was freed from the shrubs it would never reach its destination, and given enough time whatever charm possessed it would fizzle out. As a matter of fact, Enid might perhaps be tempted to hasten that process by casting Finite Incantatem. Then Santiago would have his pumpkin and they could leave this bitter cold dirt patch behind them, get something to eat, and maybe get a few people to gawk at their elaborate outfits.

Santiago has made the following discoveries:

• Two pairs of footsteps, one from the castle into the pumpkin patch and a smaller, more tightly clustered set leading from the darkness beyond the grounds into the patch, then back out into the dark.
• A Vapour Wand, which is a small cigarette sold at Huffler's Puffers in Brynwell. These are illegal to possess by anyone underage, but are nonetheless frequently traded among the studentry. The Vapour Wand lies in the dirt where the footsteps coming from the castle are seen to form a circle, suggesting someone pacing up and down.

Enid has made the following discoveries:

• A hopping jack-o-lantern which seems determined to go somewhere, but is currently stuck in the shrubs.

@Santiago Corvesso @Enid Pryce