This is the larger story I alluded to in the last one I published. I wrote most of it with help from my roommate, Nicole, who provided ideas, did some editing, and even helped write some parts, so I am going to give her co-writing credit for this. Look for her author's notes alongside mine.

A head's up about this fic's tone: I tried to keep this lighthearted and zany, but that didn't always work. This fic rests squarely in "horror/comedy", but since I got a little too into writing about zombies, a few times shit gets real. Even when it does, take it with a grain of sodium chloride. It'll bounce from horror back to horror/comedy fairly quickly.

I was hoping to get this fic completed a week ago so I could post a chapter a day, but that didn't happen. It's complete at this time though and I'm just waiting for the Nicole Seal of Editing Approval before I can post the rest of it, so chapters will go up as she finishes editing. It's supposed to be a Halloween fic, but we'll probably be posting well into tomorrow since it's already fairly late here.

Nicole's Note: It took us a month, three bags of Kit Kats, two cases of Mountain Dew Code Red, a Halloween themed playlist (which basically means all the scary music Banana listens to and then suddenly Flashlight: The Cullen Song by Eleventyseven), and short breaks to marathon zombie movies and The Walking Dead for motivation, but dammit, we finished it!

Today was a good day to go visiting old friends, or so Soldier thought. He got up bright and early, laced up his boots, remembered that he had to wear something other than boots to go outside or else the neighbors would call the cops again, and headed on his way. He didn't bother taking the bus or a cab or asking any of his merc friends for a ride, instead jogging the entire way to California. Once he arrived at his destination, he knocked three times, grew impatient, and just smashed a window with his shovel so he could climb in, unlock the door himself, climb back out, and go through the now unlocked door.

"What was that sound?!" a familiar voice asked. "Mom, is that you?! Who let you out of the basement?!" As he descended the stairs in his fluffy pink bunny slippers, MERASMUS! dropped his coffee mug down the remainder of the stairs when he saw Soldier standing in the living room covered in blood and broken glass. "What the...how the hell do you keep finding where I live?!" he demanded of his old roommate.

"Is this one of your friends, Merasmus?" another familiar voice asked. Into the room stepped Merasmus' latest roommate, John Wayne. He clearly didn't look pleased at the sight of the broken window or the blood and coffee all over the carpet.

"I heard you have a new roommate, so I brought you a house welcoming gift!" Soldier said proudly. He dug through his coat, searching the many, many pockets until he found a squashed box that he might have sat on and held it out in front of him.

Merasmus looked at the box in Soldier's outstretched hands with distrust before cautiously accepting it. "So help me if there's unrefrigerated sour cream in here..." When he finished unwrapping it, he stared at the contents with disbelief. "Is this a live hand grenade?!"

"Yes! See? It blows up when you pull the pin!"

To Merasmus' horror, Soldier reached into the box and yoinked the pin from the grenade. Realizing that it was about to explode in his hands, he panicked and tossed it, unwittingly blowing up John Wayne in the process.

"See? I wouldn't give you a grenade if it didn't work!"

Merasmus stared at the remains of his roommate in shock. "SOLDIER! CAN I GO A DAY WITHOUT YOU KILLING MY ROOMMATES?!" he screamed in anger.

"Nope!" Soldier said proudly.

"GET OUT!" Merasmus screamed.

"Enjoy your housewarming gift!" Soldier said obliviously as Merasmus forcibly shoved him out the front door.

Merasmus had finally finished scrubbing all of the brain matter and spilled coffee from the carpet and was now pacing back and forth in the living room in a bout of rage. He was really getting sick of Soldier's shit, that was for sure, and this moment had been the last straw. Not to mention what would happen when it was discovered that one of the world's biggest movie stars had just been blown up with a hand grenade.

"That idiot has got to go!" he said to himself as he tried to think of a plan that could both rid him of Soldier and solve the issue of his dead roommate at the same time. "I cannot go back to prison again!" He leaned against his bookshelf, glancing at it a moment when it wobbled, and spotted the title of a particularly dusty book. "I've got it!" he shouted at the top of his lungs to no one in particular.

Merasmus pulled the book off the shelf and blew the dust off of it, hacking up a lung hard enough that he almost threw up when he accidentally inhaled it in. After catching his breath, he slammed it on the table, wiping the rest of the dust off to reveal the title, How to Raise the Dead with Household Ingredients (Bonus Sangria recipe inside). The book still had the bright orange "$2" sticker on the cover and the label with the name of the thrift store on the back since he clearly hadn't read it yet.

"Perfect..." he said to himself as he began to make another cup of coffee and gather ingredients together.

"Can't you use a knife to do that like a civilized human being?" Spy asked Sniper. He was using his kukri to carve a particularly large pumpkin.

"This is a knife," Sniper pointed out.

"No, I mean a smaller one. One that isn't likely to take off your entire hand if you slip," Spy replied.

"It's working just fine." Spy shook his head and walked away, leaving Sniper to his devices. He got the feeling he was doing it because he knew it was bothering Spy anyway.

Usually it was only Engineer and Pyro that made a jack-o-lantern, which was basically a way of keeping Pyro occupied long enough that he was out of everyone's hair for the time being. This year however, they found themselves in the possession of about fifty or so pumpkins after Medic decided to "borrow" an unattended pickup that was transporting them to some kind of pumpkin festival. (They really got a lot of supplies from Medic hijacking random vehicles for unknown purposes, come to think of it. Rumor had it that's where all the doves came from.)

Most of their pilfered pumpkins had gotten shot up for target practice, their orange and pale yellow guts spread out across the target range like heads in a battlefield. Scout and Pyro dropped about five of them off of roofs of varying heights to see how big of a splat they'd make. What was left was currently being carved up, their guts splattered across the lunchroom table, across the floor, and leading down the hallway as though someone had skipped through the hall scattering pumpkin seeds like a flower girl at a wedding.

Engineer stayed nearby to keep an eye on Pyro, who had already carved three pumpkins and was now sitting by himself playing Candy Land with them, which was weird enough before you even realized that he was apparently losing. Medic and Heavy were both eating and Demoman was passed out and slumped over the end of the table. Generally there was nothing out of the ordinary about their nightly routines other than the fact that Scout and Sniper were currently lobotomizing the last of the bright orange squash.

"Hey Sniper, look," Scout said when he turned his pumpkin around. "He's sad because he's got a knife in his head."

Sniper smirked at Scout's pumpkin, which looked vaguely like Spy and had a butterfly knife sticking out of the side of its head and a few strings of pumpkin guts dribbling from the "wound". "It's missing something, mate."

Spy heard them both laughing and sighed with distaste when he saw them lighting a cigarette that they'd balanced in the mouth of a pumpkin that he guessed was supposed to be him. He was more offended by the idea that they thought he'd actually smoke something as cheap as Sniper's preferred brand of cigarettes than he was at the poor imitation of himself. He also discovered why one of his knives had gone missing that morning.

"You're both making a mess," he pointed out as though they could possibly be unaware of the pumpkin innards all over the floor.

"Pyro made the mess. We just made it better," Scout retorted.

The door slammed open, leaving a crack in the drywall behind it. "Men! Pyro!" Soldier shouted as he marched through the lunchroom. "I have returned!"

"We didn't even know you left," Sniper replied snidely.

"Are you covered in blood?" Engineer asked with concern.

Soldier looked at the shards of glass that were still jutting out of his arm and the wounds that looked like they were just about infected. "Huh. How long has that been there?" he questioned as though just noticing them.

"What exactly have you been doing?" Spy asked.

"Well..."

He pushed past him, having already lost interest in the matter. "Never mind, I'm sure it was something incredibly stupid."

He walked past Medic, who had just pushed his food aside and was mumbling insults in German over having to use his dinnertime to pull glass out of Soldier's arm, and nearly slipped on pumpkin guts on the way out.

"If any of you need me, I'll be in my room," he informed them on the way out.

Medic gave Demoman a shove to make room for Soldier to sit and swiped the empty bottles off the table. He remained passed out even as he fell to the floor with a thud and was rolled onto his side in case he threw up.

"Is that really a sanitary environment to be doing medical shit?" Scout asked skeptically.

"It's fine. There's enough alcohol on the table that it should be sterile," Medic replied. "So what were you doing really?" he asked Soldier.

"Oh, I heard that Merasmus had a new roommate, so I brought him a housewarming gift!" Soldier said proudly.

Everyone was silent as the weight of his implications sunk in. "Didn't that guy give you a restrainin' order?" Engineer asked.

"Yes, but I decided I wanted to go see him so I threw it away!"

"Threw it...away?" Heavy asked.

Sniper shook his head. "Mate, I ain't an expert on Yank law or anythin', but I don't think restrainin' orders work like that..."

"Oh, it's fine! He was happy to see me!" Soldier replied.

"Uh huh..."

Somehow none of them were convinced. They didn't think too much about it beyond that, though. Soldier ruining Merasmus' day was about as common as jackrabbits digging holes in the front lawn. Sometimes he retaliated and sometimes he just swore at the sky a lot and went back to his life, and considering there weren't any voodoo cursed ducks or anything attacking them, they must be safe from his wrath this year.

Right?

Demoman stirred awake at the feeling of a boot kicking his leg. He looked up to find Soldier staring at him and realized he was on the floor of the lunchroom. "I am waking you to inform you it is time for bed!" Soldier announced before walking away.

"Would'a hated to've slept through that," Demo grumbled as he got to his feet.

He slipped all over the pumpkin guts that Sniper and Scout had decided to leave for someone else to clean up and managed to stumble out of the room and down the hall. The entire base had the aromatic scent of pumpkin and several of Medic's doves as well as two of Soldier's raccoons were scrambling around eating the remains. One of the diseased procyonids, a particularly thin and mangy looking thing by the name of Private Paws, was perched on a shelf hissing at anyone she thought was coming too close to her stockpile of seeds.

Two of the carved pumpkins were already decorating the steps, a cute little smiling one that Pyro had made, and one sitting a step higher that was vomiting pumpkin guts all over the smaller one that Scout had made. Despite the fact that they were all the way to the right and away from the safety railing that ran down the center of the stairs, Demoman still managed to nearly trip over them when he stumbled drunkenly on his nightly battle with those damned demons known as the stairs. He hated stairs. One of these days he'd have to blow them all up. He stumbled and fell the remaining two steps, landing on his face in the middle of the hallway. When he looked up he realized that Heavy and Medic were both staring at him with concern.

"Who put those steps there?" he asked to save face.

"I'm fairly certain they were always there," Medic replied. The pair walked past him without bothering to see if he was alright, though Heavy looked at him over his shoulder as they moved on. They were sure he was fine. He had to have been made of adamantium to survive some of the drunken spills he took on a near daily basis.

Demo managed to get back up again and made his way somewhere to finish sleeping the alcohol off so he could get drunk again later. As he wandered aimlessly towards the nearest door, he glanced out the window and stopped. He looked closer when he thought he saw movement in the dark, vaguely outlined by the full moon. Must be a coyote, he thought to himself. Or maybe he was just hallucinating. He wasn't a hundred percent sure what was in that homebrewed crap that Sniper gave him, but he was pretty certain that at least one of the ingredients might have been floor cleaner. The figure had the obvious shape of a quadrupedal animal and when he saw two glowing orbs turn abruptly to stare straight at him through the glass, he was certain it was either the eyes of a coyote illuminated by the moon or a hallucination. No need to dwell on it any longer.

He passed out again in a nearby closet soon after, comfortably sprawled out on top of an array of boxes.

Why is Merasmus' latest roommate John Wayne, you may ask? Well that's quite an interesting story, and I'll tell you!

...there was a John Wayne movie on TV. Really. That's the only reason. His roommate was originally going to be George Romero, but for some reason we thought John Wayne was funnier, and California is closer to New Mexico than Pennsylvania anyway.

Nicole's Note: So, uh, I don't know what else to add right now, so what starter are you guys picking for Sun and Moon? I think I'm going with litten myself.

Banana: I was going to go with Litten, but then they revealed the full evolutionary tree and now I'm in love with Rowlet's archer motif. I favor the dark type so by the end of the game I'll no doubt have 4 dark types in my party anyway and I think I need that Salandit, so I don't need another fire type.

...but you know I'll end up getting a Litten at some point anyway.