Mischief Managed [Halloween S4 2019]

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Tonight was going to be fun, Chance thought to himself with a snicker. He spent quite a fair amount of time on just collecting data about the kill-joys of the evening, now was the time to act against them! He couldn't do this alone, however, fortunately, he knew exactly who to ask along with him. It took him all day to put together the note for Osiris, even more just to sneak it into the dratini's room without his mother noticing.

...That was probably very illegal to do, but what did he care? He was gonna be the world's best outlaw! The zorua donned his cape and flash emblem, slapped on his false-oversized fangs, and picked up the pumpkin shaped basket. The innards of the carrier was empty, however, so he flipped the object up onto his head-effectively transforming it into a hat.

He sneaked out of the house and into town square, a careful and cautious eye looked to and fro. This was a Top! Secret! Meeting! He had to make sure nobody was following him...Once he was satisified with his three second search, he slipped into the alleyway he told Osiris about. He searched around the boxes and barrels briefly before he located the one he scouted out several days before. A grin stretched across his expression, the "X" he marked on the crate still ready. He reached his fore-paws up onto the edge. With a keen and careful eye, he made a move to jump in...

Of course, he failed. The box flipped over with the wrong move and trapped him inside. A surprised cry escaped him as he dashed forward in a blind panic. He rammed into the side of the box and sent it flying with him across the alleyway. the box struck another barrel. The rumbling sound of wood struck fear into him as he heard something heavy drop on top of his box.

...

uh-oh.

The skiddo's ears folded back. His feet shuffled uncomfortably as his mind raced through what he should and shouldn't say. The grass type began to speak, "I-I do know, b-but b-business hasn't been th-that great and m-my supplies are l-low so I c-can't aff-AAAH!" The skiddo was cut off as he felt something touch his hind legs. The skiddo bolted forward out of instinctual fear with a frightful bleat of terror.

Chance hardly even touched the skiddo, as it volontarily burst forward from the sheer horror of being touched so suddenly from an unexpected area. He was shocked at first, but he didn't allow this to stop him. The zorua was quick to give Osiris the briefest of time windows, seeing as he was confident the dratini could zoom inside in a split second.

With a quick movement, he slammed the door shut. The zorua was quick to jump up and knock down the door's lock. The wooden bar slammed into place with a loud "clang!" A feeling of pride swelled within him as he heard the goat bleat in surprise. The door shook and shuttered as the handle was moved.

"H-Hey!" The skiddo's voice cried with a quiver of fear, "W-What are you doing? What's going on!?" he questioned.

"Trick or treeeaaat~" Chance's voice chimed from the other side of the door followed by a mischievous cackle.

Right on cue, Osiris blasted through the front door and skidded to a stop, bumping roughly into a table and a gaggle of chairs that surrounded it. He whirled on the spot only to spot Kiba slamming the door shut on the skiddo and locking him out, leaving Iris to giggle helplessly when the zoruna taunted the shopkeep.

He felt a little bad, sure. But it was Halloween, and this is what you did! If an adult didn't pass out candy, you played a prank on them. It wasn't like the guy couldn't get back into his own shop... eventually. Just as soon as he and Kiba were long gone. "The seeds!" he said swiftly, excitement and adrenaline heavily infecting his tone. He tried to sound urgent, but probably just sounded like he was having fun.

The dratini ducked under the table and scrambled through the shop, making a beeline for whatever room looked like it was there to store things.

The zorua was quick to follow the dratini. His heart pounded with excitement as he darted back towards the room he and the skiddo came from. The zorua pushed his way past the door and motioned for the dratini to follow him. The zorua looked around. It was a rather cozy looking backroom. It looked a bit more like a living space than anything. An advanced looking kitchen off to the side caught his attention. His ears perked up.

"Over here!" he spoke up again. He didn't even wait for Osiris as he bolted for the cabinets. There were a few cupboards on the ground floor, but there were also some placed up higher. His sights were set on the more out-of-reach ones. The zorua looked up at the counter. It was far too tall for event he skiddo, but there was a stool to help him get around with. He hopped up onto the stool, before his filthy paws set foot on the clean and smooth counter top.

His attention was focused on the cupboards above him, he put his mind to work on how exactly he could reach them from here. He looked down to Osiris, "There's probably good stuff up top. Know how we can get to it?" he asked.

----

Aries shook the door handle with a vine, his heart pounded in absolute terror. He felt exposed out here alone. There was nobody on the street, but that only made the feeling worse. The cold stung him. He could see his own breath in front of him. The panicked grass type looked around, more fearful of the fact that he was out and alone than he was of the fact that he was currently being mugged. The skiddo's quick mind struggled to come up with some solution to this before he remembered something important.

The back door! The skiddo bolted off to the side, his hooves resounded off the stone pathway as he galloped for the back. He needed to move quick, before the intruders realized that the backdoor was unlocked...

Dutifully, the dratini slithered behind the zorua, eager to make off with their haul. They came face-to-face with a problem as old and classic as time; they were too short to steal goodies from the kitchen cupboard. Osiris frowned as he contemplated the issue. "Can't you shapeshift into something taller?" he wondered out loud. It seemed like the kind of obvious solution that Kiba would miss, though maybe a little too good to be true.

"If not, I could... maybe wrap around your neck a little and see if I can't reach up there?" he ventured, ending with a questioning lilt. "Or you could toss me up." If all else failed, he could probably launch himself up there, or smack Kiba like a baseball and send him up instead. Dragon Tail was useful in the way that it sent its targets flying in whichever direction he thwacked 'em.

"Uuuuuh it doesn't work like that..." Chance looked over to the dratini with a confused expression. The zorua considered the little dratini's ideas for a brief moment, but none of them sounded particularly...appealing to him. He could imagine himself being choked out by the first one. The second one seems like it could go particularly wrong in many different ways...for Osiris. He seemed down for it though, so why not?

"I'll try to throw you up there? You can try to latch onto the handle and just swing it open from there maybe?" He looked to the dratini with the decision to wait for approval rather than just going ahead and enacting this plan. After all, if the dratini wasn't prepared, then Osiris could get hurt!

----

Aries made it to the back door. A vine stretched out ahead of him and wrapped around the handle. It felt almost as if the shadows behind him took form and pursued him. Relief! The door was unlocked. The door flew open as the skiddo practically flung himself inside. He slipped and skidded on the smooth flooring, falling over multiple times as he tried to bring himself back to his feet and turn around. The vines slammed the door shut with a harsh pull.

Even though the door was closed, he couldn't bring himself to let go of the handle. Strangers were in his house. He couldn't sit outside. He didn't want to go into the house either. He couldn't control himself as deep breaths forced their way in and out at a rapid pace. His eyes watered while the vines that held the door shut trembled.

He didn't know what to do.

This dice is not existing.

"Yeah, why not?" Osiris said, shrugging as much as a dratini could. It was mostly like a loose shuffle around the upper portion of his body. "Just try to aim my head towards the handle so I can grab onto it." he cautioned, slithering up next to Kiba and psyching himself up.

He had other options, of course. Nothing was stopping him from dragon rage-ing the cupboards, blasting them apart and leaving them to pick apart what fell out. He could also blast himself up there with extremespeed, but both of those choices would leave behind some pretty significant property damage. And he didn't want to be the guy who took a prank too far - that was just being cruel.

For a general lack of anything else to do, Osiris merely offered his tail up to Kiba as a means to toss him. He didn't know how the zorua planned on it, but it didn't really matter as long as they got the job done. "Ready when you are!" he said, focusing up and preparing for an epic moment. Done correctly, this could go pretty smoothly!

This dice is not existing.

Chance smiled in confidence as he bit down onto the Dratini's offered tail-perhaps a little too harshly. The zorua wasted no time in deciding exactly how he was going to do this. His eye looked over the handle and their position, as if putting careful calculations into his mind of what he should do. The dratini backed up a little before he started to swing the dratini about in a circle. He wasn't quite careful about his area though, which might of resulted in the dratini being banged into a few pots and pans stacked up on the counter and narrowly missing the side of the wall.

At juuuust the right moment, he released the dratini and shot them towards the counter top, completely oblivious to the sound of the door clanging shut just moments before. He was far too wrapped up in their little adventure to even think about what the goat might be up to right now.

----

Fortunately, the goat wasn't doing much at all. He couldn't move. He was stuck to the spot, almost feeling as if his vines were about to snap into two with the tension between him and the door. He couldn't get his breathing to regulate as he just stared at the door handle. He could hear noises in the kitchen behind him, but still he couldn't move. A lump formed in his throat. Why couldn't Yera be here? Why didn't he go with her?

The skiddo's breathing went from deep and slow to shallow and rapid. It felt like no matter how much he tried, it wasn't enough. The sight of the handle began to blur as he began to cry.

Osiris made a quiet little eep when he felt the sensation of a sharp pair of fangs bite into his tail. He might have had second thoughts about their little idea, but at that point, Kiba took him for a spin. This honestly wasn't what they had planned, like, at all, and as his head clanged against various saucepans and skillets, he had to wonder what it was like inside of Kiba's head.

At that precise moment, he was thrown up into the air. The sense of vertigo strongly impeded any kind of fang-eye coordination that Osiris had, and it wasn't like he even stopped spinning one he was launched upward. He smacked into the door of the cupboard mercilessly, a resounding smack echoing through the room as he was stuck comically onto the surface for a second. Then he began to fall - but only so much, because as lady luck would have it, the same tail Kiba had bitten onto had lodged itself through the handle of the cupboard door.

He latched onto his foothold out of instinct, but that was all that was in the cards. This left Iris dazed, dangling half-helplessly from the cupboard handle, groaning in pain, discomfort, and confusion. "G-good one, Kiba," he mumbled, his tone wobbly, uncertain, and perhaps just a little bit dry.

He...kind of regretted it. The smack of the dratini bashing into the cupboard made him flinch. His eyes squinted as a paw lifted up, his whole body shrunk down a little as he imagined just how much that hurt. He could hear the Dratini's word of "Gratitude" though he knew better than to consider it a genuine form of appreciation.

A sheepish smile stretched across his expression as he gave a light and nervous laugh, "Ahhah....sorry." He'd just have to be a little more careful next time he threw Osiris around like that. His ears perked back up as he stood on his toes with interest in the cupboard.

"Can you get it open like that?" he questioned the dragon type.

----

The thieves were in his kitchen. He could hear every sound as they raided and destroyed his property. His stuff wasn't what he feared for. He forced his eyes shut with struggled breaths. He had to stay quiet. He couldn't bring himself to move, but if he was quiet, then maybe they wouldn't notice. Maybe they wouldn't kill him.

Aries tried to block out the ruckus and focus on the darkness in his closed eyes. His mind began to count. Not anything in particular nor in any real order, just random numbers as he tried to think of literally anything else but this situation he was in. No matter how hard he tried, however, his mind always drifted back to the many different ways Yera could possibly find his corpse in the morning.

"Uh, hold on," Osiris muttered. He gave his tail an experimental wriggle, but nothing really happened. The dratini had no leverage to work with and he had to swing the cupboard outward. "Maybe if I..."

The dragon-type shut his mouth and focused, his tongue sticking out a little bit unconsciously as he let his serpentine body droop downwards, only keeping the barest part of his tail coiled around the handle. Hanging upside down as he was, his diglett head slipped right off onto the floor, but that wasn't important. He gently swung himself forward. Then backward, then forward a little more, and so on. On his fourth swing, he heard a tell-tale clack, and when he pulled himself up to look, the door was open!

Now he just had to get in there. Osiris leaned back a bit, using what little body weight he had to get the cupboard door as close to being shut as possible without being shut. Then he stretched, long and hard, reaching up with his head and biting down hard on the edge of the cupboard doorway before letting go of the handle and wrestling himself up there.

"Whew," he exclaimed, shaking himself out once he made it. "Okay, what are we lookin' for again?"

Chance watched the little acrobat with a particular interest as the dratini maneuvered their way into the cupboard. He had to hold back his excitement once the dratini was in. He didn't want to attract any attention to himself just yet. The gored rattata gave the dratini a thumbs up with an excited nod before he spoke up, "Seeds! Little round things, have a little stem comin out of em that looks like a mouth or somethin. Then just anything you else you can find! We gotta get 'im good for this...otherwise he won't have anythin next year either!"

His attention was focused solely on the dratini. If he paid any attention, he could hear the quiet sobs over by the back door. His tail wagged excitedly. This was going to be the best night ever, he could just FEEL it!

----

This was the worst night ever. Well, he'd certainly had worse, but this time it might actually be his last. He could hardly think straight as failed to even remotely attempt to calm himself down. He wished Skylar were here. He wished Yera were here. Hell, he'd take just about any friendly face right now. Someone to fend off these villainous criminals and tell him everything would be alright. If there was one thing he missed about his homeland, it was the near constant watch of his herd. Every one of them were always there for him.

Now, he was alone. How pathetic he was all on his own as well. His father would certainly be angered by this display. Normally this would be the point where any average person might buck up and try to do better, but he could only melt forward and press his horns against the wooden door. Why couldn't people just leave him alone?

Nodding dutifully, Osiris whirled on the spot and delved the depths of the cupboard to search for their prizes. Honestly, it seemed a little lackluster - the skiddo wasn't lying when he said he had nothing to give out. There were some spoons and ladles, spices and weird-looking bottles, and decidedly nothing that looked delicious. He went ahead and searched every nook and cranny, though, slithering through and upending things he could find in the process.

It was a pretty noisy process as he knocked over just about everything, but it yielded some kind of result. Stashed away in a dusty corner of the cabinet he found a little bag that was all tied up at the top. A little gentle nosing and it came undone; lo and behold, inside it was exactly what Kiba described.

"I dunno if these are the right seeds, but they're definitely seeds..." he said as he slithered back up to the edge of the cupboard, looking down at Kiba. "Here, catch!" With that, he gently dropped the bag of seeds, giving it a little bit of a toss so that it'd land near him if the zorua didn't catch it. "The other stuff up here is just boring - we should look somewhere else and see what he's got."

The blunderbuss up top knocked things over, he narrowly dodged a falling tin and bottle, a sharp crash rang as a glass met the floor. He was annoyed, but all negativity was dismissed as the dratini found precisely what they came here for. What luck!

With a graceful-and dangerous considering the counter-top's height- hop, he caught the bag with a mischievous snicker that sounded a bit more malicious than he intended. It didn't stop him, however, as he dropped the bag into his paw so that he can talk up to the dratini.

"Think you can get over to that other cupboard over there?" he nodded his head towards another cupboard not too far from the one they invaded. There was a bit of a gap between them that required a sizable jump, but Chance believed in Osiris's abilities. There's no way the dratini would let him down!

"I'll look down in the ones beneath the counter," he spoke. He didn't exactly wait for the dratini as he popped the bag back into his mouth and dropped down onto the stool. His barely had time to hit the floor before he started to nose his way into the next cupboard.

Osiris followed Kiba's gaze, spotting the other cupboard and he smiled along with the zorua. He'd made longer leaps than that before - the only tough part about this was that the cupboard was shut, but all he had to do was aim for the handle again! Easy peasy.

"Yeah, probably," he agreed, pushing some stuff surrounding him away with his tail to give himself some wriggle room.

With a bit of a running start and a lot of blind faith, the dratini took off and lunged out of the cupboard. Just like with the other cupboard, he aimed for the handle with his tail and slid it through, coiling it up and catching himself. The dratini repeated the door-swinging trick with a bit of repetition, hearing the same satisfying clack and wrestling himself up into the cupboard. It felt nice to be good at something for once - usually, he just went around getting his butt kicked, but given the right motivation of mischief, it seemed like he was quite the hamburlgar.

This one also seemed to yield a goodie. Inside it - alongside some other boring things, like utensils and a cookbook or two - lay another baggie. Thinking it was more seeds, he eagerly nosed it open and peered inside, and what he found was strangely intimidating. It was money. A full pouch of poke stared back at him, and suddenly he had a choice to make.

"Uh... any luck down there?" he called, leaving it where it sat and peering down at the zorua ransacking cabinets.

Door after door was opened, but he was met with either dust bunnies, cooking utensils, or...scarves? What? That wasn't even a food! He grew irritated. Surely the skiddo must have had something! They just had to find it...perhaps he kept his stash somewhere a bit more secure...like a bedroom? Oh-or maybe there was some sort of basement to this place? He could only imagine just how many goodies one little skiddo could stash in a whole basement!

Despite entering through a cupboard, he wiggled and wormed his way into a drawer after prying open the back end of it. He crawled into the drawer as he heard the dratini's voice sound from above. He pushed against the ceiling with his paws and forced the drawer to roll open, "No!" he huffed in annoyance, "What about you? He's gotta have SOMETHING around here we could take!"