Jack O' Lantern

If you’ve ever felt a cold autumn breeze or heard a wolf howling on a cloudless night, you might have had a close encounter with Jack O’ Lantern, a demonic spirit who haunts the mortal realm once a year on Halloween.  Or just whenever she feels like it, honestly. A demonic spirit with two faces, and composed of infinite amounts of candy, any interaction with her is sure to be a frightening good time.
Long ago, Jack O’ Lantern was a mortal alchemist named Jackie, who dreamed of creating the ultimate candy, one that was so sweet and delicious that it would melt even the coldest heart.  But one night, while mixing the sweet brew, she accidentally added an extra ingredient to the concoction: Chemical X. The resulting explosion ended up creating not one, but *seven* legendary candies with the power to grant people’s wishes.  Unfortunately, the fumes from the explosion also mortally poisoned Jackie. Fearful of her own death, and a fairly decent poker player, Jackie decided to gamble for eternal life with Satan. Against all odds, she won - but when the lord of hell discovered that she’d cheated to attain victory, he granted her request for immortality, but with a spectacularly spooky twist.
Now known as Jack O’ Lantern, her immortal duty is to help guide spirits from one world to the next when the veil between the living and departed is the thinnest - that is to say, every Halloween night.  Despite her frightening appearance and her tendency to making delightfully demonic deals, all she really wants is to have a good time and make some new friends.
== Powers ==
Jack O’ Lantern is a very old and powerful spirit with abilities that only very loosely relate to her epithet.  Her powers are almost entirely decided by which of her two faces - Jack, or Lantern - are currently active. Lantern’s personality is much calmer, but still vaguely sinister, and her powers represent the cold embrace of death.  Thus, her powers are largely ice and necromancy themed; summoning giant glaciers with a flick of her wrist, calling forth hordes of undead minions, and paralyzing foes by showing them their worst nightmares when they gaze into her eyes.
Jack’s face, on the other hand, symbolizes the infernal rage of hell, and the terrifying human capacity for cruelty.  This personality is much more frightening and aggressive; creating geysers of hellish flames and summoning burning skulls that laugh maniacally even as they’re destroyed.  She can also summon her burning hell-steed, Slippers, while this face is active, although she has yet to do so because Slippers appears to have entered a rebellious phase.
The key mechanic of her boss fight is that the players have the ability to swap Jack O’ Lantern’s faces from one to the other, once per combat.  When the face is swapped, all of her active abilities ‘detonate’ as they are suddenly shifted to the opposite polarity, dealing heavy damage to anyone around them.  The face must be flipped once in a while, however, as all of her abilities get stronger and stronger the longer that a single face is active. This mechanic didn’t end up being utilized all that much due to how chaotic the fight became, but she was still a decent challenge for the party regardless.
Her other notable power revolves around making deals.  She can grant someone almost anything they want, but to do so, the individual must gamble for it with a coin flip.  If Pumpkin is flipped, the player gets their desired result, but on a Jack O’ Lantern, something negative that Jack O’ Lantern chooses and is roughly equivalent to the worth of the desired result happens instead.  She usually presents this as a fair coin flip, but of course, it’s not so simple; as a master gambler, she has the power to rig the coin flips however she desires.
In addition, Jack O’ Lantern does have an Outclass and Overclass, but she didn’t use either one in her boss fight. Her Outclass was revealed, however, in Episode 77.
=== [OUTCLASS] Two Heads Are Better Than One ===
During the Reaper's Reverie match, in order to guard the Cursed candy as effectively as possible, Jack O' Lantern used her Outclass. She takes her scythe and splits herself in half vertically, and then orange flames consume each half and regenerate them into a full duplicate of Jack O' Lantern. Now fully separate, each duplicate has one of her two faces and personalities, and as such they can no longer be flipped. Rather than detonating as they did before, her abilities can now detonate each other whenever they make contact with its opposite half's abilities, meaning that they can cause widespread destruction very quickly. However, in this state, her powers do not get stronger over time, and she also has to spend Stamina to stay divided.
== Destruction Bench Agreement ==
=== Episode 65 ===
When else would she have first appeared but a Halloween special?  This episode revolved around Seda and the rest of the party trying to locate the seven legendary candies that were mentioned earlier.  The first six candies are powerful on their own, but the seventh is the strongest of all, bearing the ability to grant almost any wish.  Plus, the party just wanted to have a fun time trick-or-treating as well. Jack O’ Lantern first appeared fairly innocuously, simply skipping down a sidewalk before introducing herself to the group.  They had mixed reactions to her, to say the least, considering that Seda and Candy are both extremely scared beans. She explained that her job is to escort spirits from one world to the next, but since Candy seemed to be doing just fine, there was no reason for her to harm her.  She also mentioned that she was running a casino that people could come visit if they so desired. The party deemed this to be a terrible idea, particularly Kai, who is suspicious of demons in the first place, for obvious reasons.
After several misadventures involving ghosts, weebs, and Boys, Emrick suggested that they may as well pay the casino a visit simply because there was nothing else for them to do before going to the graveyard to acquire the final candy.  This is where Jack O’ Lantern introduced her wish-granting coin flips. The first, tamest request was by Hope, simply asking for some candy. She rigged this coin flip in Hope’s favor, to lure the rest of them into a false sense of security.  Afterwards, Inev attempted to gamble for increased crit range, and used his powers to try and rig the flip himself. Because of this, rather than the 100% chance of failure he would’ve had, he had a 33% chance to succeed. He still failed, unfortunately.  Finally, Emrick gambled to get a hint about how to break his maritime curse at the risk of making the curse slightly worse. Jack O’ Lantern decided to keep this gamble a 50/50 chance, simply because she found the bargain interesting. True to Emrick’s luck, he won the coin flip.  Candy also asked Jack O’ Lantern about how old she was, which she was thankfully able to ascertain by checking her notebook. Candy also managed to guess her epithet after several false guesses by the other party members.
Finally, when the party went to spooky graveyard and raised their six candies aloft, it was rather predictably revealed that Jack O’ Lantern serves as the guardian of the candies, and the seventh one is actually a candy heart that’s buried in her chest.  In order to prove themselves worthy, the party had to face her in a very long, epic battle. While she put up a strong fight, several people used the power of the candies to summon additional characters to the combat (like Voia and Zephyr), making things extremely difficult for her.  In the end, a string of several natural 20s by the party ended with Hope ripping the final candy from her chest with her teeth, preventing Jack O’ Lantern from using her powerful Outclass in the combat as was originally planned. All in all, Jack O’ Lantern had a pretty good time and wished the party good luck in their future endeavors.
=== Episode 77 ===
In what is certainly one of the DBA staff's more ill-advised decisions, they decided to hand over the reigns of one of their matches to Jack O' Lantern and her fellow harbinger of death, Raphael Ravenfeather. True to her mischievous nature, she enlisted the help of Grublock to literally just kill the party before the match even started, which is particularly hilarious considering it was the first match for all the participants. Having died, the souls of both teams were brought to the Underworld, a karmically-neutral plane of death ruled by the Grim Reapers. Washing up on the banks of the River Styx, which flows through multiple planes apparently, Jack O' Lantern announced that the title of this match would be Reaper's Reverie. Since Alan had been distracted from his participation in the match, she decided to have her shadowy friend Dylaxaphi fill in as a participant.
Other than overseeing the general progression of the match, Jack O' Lantern didn't do much until the second phase of the battle, where both teams were brought to the Cathedral of One Thousand Souls, a meeting place for the Reapers. She revealed that the gimmick for the second half of this match would be based around retrieving not a wish candy, but a CURSED candy that would allow whoever consumes it to have control over her temporarily, essentially making it so that she would join the team of whoever eats it. However, she and Raphael were standing guard over the candy, and she even used her powerful Outclass to ensure as much of a defensive barrier as possible. Unfortunately, no one managed to claim the candy, though Synibon came quite close. 
== Trivia ==
*Jack O' Lantern was originally going to be an antagonist in Iris' magical girl Anime Campaign that was discontinued. Sylvia was generous enough to let Iris make her the antagonist of DBA's own Halloween special, a full year later.
*The idea of Jack O' Lantern is inspired by the original Celtic legend that eventually became the holiday we celebrate today, where a man named Jack gambled with Satan in the same manner. Iris' adaptation of it came about from thinking, 'what if that character were a female witch?'
*The curse she's under has nothing to do with Jack O' Lantern's two faces. Jack O' Lantern had a split personality and Bipolar personality disorder even before she was cursed.
*Even Jack O' Lantern is nervous about messing with the Vanderbelts. This was made clear to dissuade the party from asking for her help in dealing with them, since neither GM wanted them to try and start an all-out war with them this early on.
*While the lesser candies were all used during her boss battle, it wasn't until Episode 74 that the seventh, most powerful candy was used. Emrick also received his hint about how to break his curse during the same episode.
Category:Characters
Category:Destruction Bench Agreement Characters