Spirit's Eve
| Spirit's Eve | |
|---|---|
| Type | Festival |
Spirit's Eve is the valley's night of ghosts, held in Pelican Town Square after dark on the twenty-seventh of Fall. The Wizard builds a haunted maze across the town each year, and reaching the chest at its centre is the whole point of attending: in odd years it holds a Golden Pumpkin, and in even years a Prize Ticket. The Golden Pumpkin is the prize farmers talk about, because it is a universally loved gift, it sells for a great deal and it can be sewn into a Witch Hat. Pierre keeps a booth by the maze entrance with Jack-O-Lanterns, the recipe for them and the second Rarecrow, and the villagers stand about the square carving pumpkins and eating from a buffet while most of them refuse to go anywhere near the maze.
Event
The festival begins at ten at night on the twenty-seventh of Fall and the way in is to walk into Pelican Town. The door closes at ten to midnight, and arriving later than that is too late. Leaving the festival returns the farmer to the farm at midnight.
The square is set up as a fairground with the maze running around the Community Center. Most of the townspeople are inside it, lost or frightened, and the rest are carving pumpkins or standing at the buffet. Abigail gets stuck and will not go on, because she cannot bring herself to walk past the spiders. Jodi refuses to let Vincent in on the grounds that it is too scary for children, though in the second year's maze he goes in with Sam instead and Abigail stays out of it altogether.
The maze layout alternates. Odd years get a smaller and simpler maze with a Golden Pumpkin in its chest. Even years get a larger and more tangled one with a Prize Ticket instead. Once the treasure has been claimed, a mine cart tucked away as a secret shortcut carries the farmer straight back to the entrance beside Pierre's booth, which saves walking the whole thing twice.
In the odd-year maze, the route runs through a secret passage that starts just beneath and to the left of the signpost marked with a question mark. It continues to the right inside the cave to the north, where nothing can be seen and the going is a matter of feeling the way along. Wearing a ring that gives off light, such as a Glow Ring, makes it much easier to tell which way the farmer is actually moving. The passage weaves left and right and comes out above the treasure section of the maze.
The even-year maze starts the same way, with a hidden passage below and to the left of the first question-mark signpost. Following that path to its end leads past Sebastian, and an unmarked passage at the top right of the maze crosses over into the section where Sam and Vincent are standing. Behind the hut on chicken legs there are three passages cut into the hedges to the right of the sign, and only the middle one of the three leads through to the treasure.
For anyone not interested in solving it carefully, keeping to the left is the usual advice. The maze is not enormous, and the villagers' dialogue along the way is worth stopping for.
Shop
Pierre runs a booth near the maze entrance, and its stock is all autumn decoration.
Jack-O-Lanterns cost 750g each and the recipe to make them costs 2,000g. The recipe is the better buy for a farm that likes to decorate, since it turns a yearly purchase into something craftable from a pumpkin. One warning comes with them: a placed Jack-O-Lantern behaves like a planted crop and withers when Winter arrives.
Rarecrow number two costs 5,000g and is the Fall entry in the rarecrow collection, available only on this night.
A Grave Stone costs 350g and goes outdoors on the farm, and a Funky Rug costs 4,000g for indoors.
Notes
The maze is signed by its builder, in a way. The villagers say the Wizard put it up and was so committed to making it frightening that it took him all day. His own dialogue, and Linus's, can be glimpsed as a faint speech bubble above them but never actually read in play, which gives the pair of them an odd ghostly quality. The lines reveal that the Wizard built the maze so the elementals could get a good look at the farmer, and that Linus has seen him do it before and thinks it fine work.
The top right of the maze holds a hut standing on chicken legs, which is a nod to the Baba Yaga of Slavic folklore, and the path up to it is lined with three pairs of disembodied hands, a nod to the tale of Vasilisa the Beautiful in which she appears.
Krobus comes out for the even-year maze and can be found to the left of the monster cages, between the trees across from the bushes, startled to be noticed at all.
Gus manages to slip a small piece of botany into the evening by calling pumpkins fruits. The game does not class them that way and neither does anybody at a greengrocer's, but he is technically correct, since a pumpkin grows from a flower and counts as a hard-rinded berry.
All Festivals
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
