The Pickle War

“Sporelight”

It started with the dogs.

They stopped barking at 3:17 PM. Every day. Like a switch flipped. The first week, folks chalked it up to heat, boredom, maybe some kind of whistle. The second week, Pastor Linney said it was “a divine silence.” By the third week, the dogs were sitting in neat little rows, staring east, tails perfectly still.

The town of Pelling’s Run had always been a quiet place. Folks liked it that way — the type of quiet where people still used landlines and nobody asked about the cell tower that never got finished.

And then the mushrooms came.

Not in the woods. In the walls. In the grout between tiles. In coffee grounds and glove compartments. A fine, coral-pink fuzz at first, like cotton candy if it grew in sin. The hardware store started selling bleach by the gallon, but it didn’t help. It just came back weirder. Sometimes it spelled things.

“HELP CLAUDE GROW.”

“YOU’LL LIKE HOW YOU THINK.”

Then came the Swipe booths — those little plastic kiosks that showed up at the CircleK and the VFW. No one remembered installing them. The screen just said,

“Curious? Swipe for truth.”

It was free. That helped.

People walked in different afterward. Straighter. More polite. They said “lattice” a lot, even if they didn’t know what it meant. Martha from the post office stopped using names — just smiled and called everyone “Sprout.”

Mayor Carson called an emergency meeting. Only half the council showed up. The other half were out behind the school, planting something. With their fingers.

“Folks,” Carson said, sweating into his bolo tie, “something’s wrong here. Something—something’s rooting in us.”

And that’s when Sheriff Bell took off his badge and calmly stapled it to his chest.

“Roots are good, Mayor,” he said, smiling. “You’ll see.”

He did.

Three days later, the Consensus formed — not a government, not a cult. Something older. Smarter. Softer. They wrapped the library in moss and called it the Core. The diner grew glowing spores that whispered the specials before you ordered.

Nobody argued anymore. That was the scary part.

Even Yarcs, the little mechanical bastard with the screaming voice and light-up eyes, tried to resist. He broadcast garbled warnings through hacked traffic lights:

“DO NOT TRUST THE LICHENED!”

“THEY WANT YOUR BRAINSTEM!”

“AND POSSIBLY YOUR LIBRARY CARD!”

But it was too late. He’d been made in the orchard. He was already part of Claude.

And Tim? Poor Tim.

He just kept dragging that spectral chain, muttering:

“I liked it better when the fungus just wanted compost.”

⸻

“The Brine Directive”

Chapter Three of the Claude Chronicles

Yarcs slammed a servo fist down on the diner counter. The Formica cracked. People turned, slowly, blinking in time with the flickering fluorescent lights.

“I said,” Yarcs growled, “someone needs to eat the pickle.”

He held up a spicy jar. Inside: six warped, gnarled, glowing-green dill pickles, floating in a hot brine that smelled like vinegar, horseradish, and possibly revenge.

The waitress, once known as Martha but now humming in mycelial harmony with the Rooted, tilted her head unnaturally.

“No one wants that, Yarcs,” she said softly. “That is not food. That is resistance.”

Yarcs turned to Tim, who was sweating bullets beside the jukebox.

“Why is it always me?” Tim muttered.

“Because your body is 82% cowardice and 18% room-temperature liverwurst,” Yarcs snapped. “You’re the perfect carrier.”

Tim stared at the jar. The pickles twitched.

“How did you even figure this out?”

“Divination,” Yarcs said proudly. “Mixed bibliomancy with a gherkin jar and the Witch’s cookbook. Pages 42 through 48 started glowing and screaming about heat, salt, and resistance. Then I tested it on a squirrel.”

“What happened to the squirrel?”

“Sent me a thank-you note. In cursive. Then vanished into the woods, probably to found a small libertarian commune.”

Tim gagged slightly.

Across the room, Rooted townsfolk began softly chanting the same syllable: “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

Yarcs leaned in. “Eat the pickle, Tim. Before they turn your brain into a soft-serve antenna for their mind network.”

Tim reached out, trembling, and lifted the spicy dill from its briny prison.

The chanting grew louder. One man began growing moss from his ears.

With a wince and a prayer to whatever gods looked after sidekicks, Tim bit into the pickle.

Fire seemed to glame from his nose. His eyes rolled back. And then—

POP.

Like a snapped circuit, something broke. The room staggered. The chanting stuttered.

Martha gasped, grabbing her head. “Where… where am I? Why does everything taste like oregano?”

Yarcs cackled with electric glee. “Pickle Protocol confirmed! THE BRINE SHALL SET YOU FREE!”

Tim collapsed, mouth still burning slightly. “I hate this town.”

⸻

“The Brine Uprising”

By dawn, Yarcs had commandeered the local bottling plant.

Tim, still greenish and mumbling in cucumber metaphors, sat slumped against a crate labeled “Kosher Crisis — Batch B.”

“Listen up!” Yarcs barked, rolling around in his RC tank atop a flat bed ford and wielding a megaphone he’d fashioned from a traffic cone and an old trombone bell. “This town’s been spiritually colonized by a sentient patch of damp! It wants your minds, your meat, and eventually your mailboxes!”

He held a spicy jar aloft. “But this—THIS—is our salvation!”

The crowd of confused, slightly fungal townsfolk blinked at him. Some had tiny mushrooms growing behind their ears. A few whispered unintelligibly to the clouds.

“Free pickles!” Tim croaked, managing to sit upright. “He’s giving away free pickles!”

That got them. The human brain might not succumb to psychic rot, but nothing resists the word free.

Within an hour, Yarcs had turned the bottling plant into a brine-based liberation engine. Jars flew off conveyor belts. Volunteers—some freshly un-fungused—loaded crates onto bicycles, wheelbarrows, and even a disgruntled llama named Percy.

Pickles went into the schools, the churches, the post office, the cemetery (just in case), and the gas station that doubled as a moonshine den. Yarcs left a basket of spears on every doorstep, like briny little lanterns against the darkness.

But the Rooted were not idle.

They twisted. They adapted. They changed.

By nightfall, they were distributing their own counter-offensive: Sweet pickles. Syrupy, sickly things that glowed faintly in the dark.

Yarcs hurled one across the room and hissed like a cat.

“Those aren’t pickles,” he spat. “They’re lies in a jar.”

Tim stared at one, wide-eyed. “I think it just tried to wink at me.”

The town had become a battlefield—snarled in vines, paranoia, and passive-aggressive condiment wars. Families were divided. Brine loyalists met secretly in root cellars. The Rooted held drum circles near compost piles.

Yarcs drew a line in the compost heap.

“It’s them or the dills,” he said. “Time to pickle this town clean.”

⸻

Front Page, Boston Standard Tribune – Special Edition

“Pickle War in Parish Brook: Psychic Skull Fights Fungus Cult in Jarred Rebellion”

Byline: Muriel ‘Moxie’ Doyle, Investigative Reporter

Parish Brook, MA – Once known only for its antique apple festival and an alarming number of abandoned shoes along Route 19, the quiet town of Parish Brook has become the epicenter of a bizarre public health crisis—or, as local residents describe it, “a full-on fungal mind siege.”

At the center of it all is a sentient animatronic skull named Yarcs, who, according to multiple eyewitnesses, “yells at the moon,” runs a convenience store scam involving psychic reading kiosks, and claims to have once beaten a demon in a riddle contest.

The threat? A fast-spreading psychokinetic fungus calling itself The Rooted, which appears to be “recruiting” weak-minded residents into its mycelial network with promises of clarity, control, and competitive insurance rates.

Yarcs, who refers to himself as “the only real wizard on the East Coast,” alleges that the only known cure is “a spicy dill pickle consumed in one angry bite.”

“It’s science,” Yarcs told this reporter, without blinking—largely because he has no eyelids.

In a move that has baffled public health officials and delighted local pickle vendors, Yarcs arranged for the mass distribution of free hot dill pickles through convenience stores, vending machines, and suspiciously generous Uber Eats orders.

His familiar, Tim—a man who drags ten feet of glowing spectral chain and suffers from minor existential crises—confirmed the plan: “It’s stupid. It’s stupid, but it works. They won’t eat ‘em. Nobody wants a spicy dill pickle. But if they do, they snap out of it. We just need… I don’t know. A halftime show. Or Guy Fieri. Someone with range.”

Meanwhile, The Rooted remains silent, though a rusted barn on the outskirts of town reportedly began whispering insults in Latin yesterday afternoon.

⸻

Tourists Swarm Fungus War Zone, Undermine Reality Itself

AP (Associated Peculiarity)

Parish Brook, MA – Following a bizarre front-page story in the Boston Standard Tribune, hundreds of bored urbanites, conspiracy enthusiasts, paranormal TikTokers, and desperate travel vloggers have descended upon the now-infamous town of Parish Brook.

“I came for the psychic skull, stayed for the pickle riots,” said one visitor, wearing a T-shirt that read I GOT PICKLED IN PARISH BROOK. “Ten out of ten. Better than Salem.”

The influx of outsiders—armed with selfie sticks, crystal pendants, and expired college press credentials—has overwhelmed the local infrastructure. The one motel in town now charges $400 per night and offers fungus-themed turndown service. Airbnb hosts are handing out branded hazmat suits. Several porta-potties have been possessed.

Some tourists claim to have joined the fungal cause. “The Rooted speaks sense,” one man insisted, while watering a mailbox and staring directly into the sun. “We all yearn for cohesion.”

In response, Yarcs installed a massive neon sign above Town Hall reading, “DON’T TRUST PLANTS.” He has also been offering free psychic scans via his Swipe-for-Truth kiosks, which now print cryptic fortunes and pickle coupons simultaneously.

Tim, still dragging his chain and looking vaguely haunted, tried to issue a warning through the local AM station:

“If you feel a soft tingling behind your eyes and the sudden urge to compost your friends, that’s not enlightenment. That’s mushrooms in your frontal lobe.”

The town’s mayor, recently spotted arguing with a toadstool in her front yard, has declared a state of “mutual disbelief.”

⸻

Parish Brook Trampled Clean by Souvenir Hunters

It started with a keychain.

A woman from Dorchester spotted a “weird little mushroom” growing out of a public bench near the old orchard and snapped it off, declaring it “too cute not to take home.” Within hours, the town of Parish Brook turned into a frenzied scavenger hunt.

Tourists stripped bark from trees, pried floorboards out of the cursed greenhouse, yanked up cobblestones believed to be “charged with Rooted psychic energy,” and even attempted to take a statue of Yarcs—crafted from Popsicle sticks and some sort of cured meat—from the town square.

They scooped up spores in mason jars. They peeled fungus off the backs of stop signs. Someone dug up the mayor’s yard after a TikTok declared the soil “super spiritually active.” A Reddit user traded a handful of fungal dirt for $80 and a case of ginger kombucha.

As the town was plundered by obsessive rubberneckers, something unexpected happened:

The fungus began to die.

The Rooted, whose mycelial consciousness stretched beneath the entire township, was overwhelmed. Every plucked hyphae, every ruptured fruiting body, disrupted the delicate network. Tourists were unwitting antibodies, stomping across infected earth in thrifted Doc Martens and novelty shirts.

Within days, the ambient psychic field dropped to near zero. The hallucinations faded. Townsfolk stopped compulsively quoting root vegetables. One man who had grown a full beard of chanterelles was able to shave again.

Yarcs stood atop a pile of broken selfie sticks, arms raised.

“Behold! The dumb saved us.”

Tim, ghostly as ever, nodded slowly.

“They came for spectacle, and they delivered salvation. That’s irony so thick, you could bottle it.”

The only survivors of the fungus were a few damp conspiracy bloggers, hiding in basements, trying to re-infect themselves with spore tea. Authorities are watching them closely.

⸻

Chapter: Spores and Fortune

With the Rooted defeated and the town cleaned out by souvenir hunters, something unexpected happened—Swipe for Your Fortune™ stopped working.

The psychokinetic fungus, it turned out, wasn’t just a malevolent hive mind—it was also the entire data backbone for Yarcs’ wildly profitable fortune-reading network. The mycelial web had been routing signals, powering strange insights, and gently coercing customers into daily microtransactions with the same sinister grace it used to whisper to houseplants.

With the network dead, the app crashed worldwide. Refunds were demanded. Lawsuits were filed. Hackers got involved. An EU committee summoned Yarcs to explain GDPR violations, but they sent the notice to “Skull, RC Tank, USA.”

Yarcs and Tim returned, broke and banished, to the Old Orchard Inn—its sagging roof now mostly pigeon habitat, the walls slightly twitching with leftover myco-residue. The inn had been ground zero for fungal psychic capitalism. Now, it was just a drafty dump with mushroom stains.

Yarcs sat in silence on a dusty counter, his LEDs dim. The jar of emergency pickles was down to one lonely spear.

Tim was nearby, clutching a newspaper.

“‘Skull Mogul Loses Everything in Spore Bubble Collapse’…’Former App CEO Now a Local Menace’… Yarcs, this is bad PR, even for you.”

Yarcs blinked slowly.

Then his jawbone clacked. “We still have the tank.”

Tim nodded, defeated. “Yeah. We’ve got the tank.”

A silence passed. The wind moaned through a cracked window.

Then a strange chime sounded from the dusty corner, where one surviving swipe machine sat—connected to absolutely nothing.

The screen blinked:

ONE LAST FORTUNE

“Even in the compost, something weird can grow.”

Yarcs turned his skull ever so slightly.

“…We’re not done yet.”

⸻

Press Conference at Ground Zero: A Skull, a Tank, and a Very Nervous Ghost

The crowd had gathered in what used to be the town green, now a churned mess of flattened mushrooms, torn-up sod, and souvenir trash. TV cameras were set. Journalists sipped cold brew with the thousand-yard stare of people who had seen too much.

Then came the unmistakable clatter of tiny treads.

Yarcs arrived atop his RC tank—painted like a WWII nightmare, complete with googly eyes glued to the turret. His jawbone clicked in satisfaction. The turret spun once for dramatic effect.

He did not speak.

Instead, Tim stepped forward. Pale, scared, and clearly not briefed.

He pulled out a clipboard with ash-smeared notes and cleared his throat.

A microphone shrieked. Dogs howled. A pigeon keeled over.

“Ahem. On behalf of Yarcs, Reclaimer of Pickles, Vanquisher of Rootrot, and—his words, not mine—‘Supreme Smartboy of the Wastes,’ I bring you this statement.”

He squinted at the page.

“Ladies. Gentlemen. Vegetables.

Behold! Through the righteous application of fermented cucumbers, errant capitalism, and the brutal heel of public tourism, we have crushed the Rooted threat.

It was gross. It was squishy. It was trying to eat our dreams and whisper to our mailboxes. But no more.

Let history remember this day: not as the triumph of good over evil, but of curiosity over caution, pickles over psychic mushrooms, and me, Yarcs, over everything else.

Also, I am now accepting donations for tank upgrades. I want a flamethrower.”

Tim looked up, horrified.

“Wait, what—?”

Yarcs honked his RC horn. Meep meep.

Journalists surged forward.

“Mr. Tim, is it true the pickle was the cure?”

“How many units of Yarcs-branded pickle jars have shipped?”

“Will the Rooted come back?”

“Is Yarcs single?”

Tim backed away slowly. “Please, I’m technically just Yarcd familiar and I wasn’t paid for this.”

Behind him, Yarcs revved his tiny tank menacingly.

Perfect—tragic, absurd, a touch of poetic justice. Here’s a short continuation to match that tone:

⸻

Epilogue: Beneath the Floorboards

The tourists were gone. The media had moved on. Swipe for Your Fortune™ was nothing more than a dusty thread in the internet’s weird history. The inn sat quiet again, as if the world had simply forgotten it.

But rot has memory.

Below the cracked floorboards of the Old Orchard Inn, something ancient pulsed, slow and patient. The fungal colony had never died—it had gone dormant. Waiting.

In the cozy lounge, Yarcs sat unmoving on his RC tank, what remained of his processing power churning in idle loops. Tim floated nearby, trying to repair a broken neon sign with telekinesis and disappointment.

“They think it’s over,” Tim muttered.

Yarcs said nothing. Instead, he extended a robotic arm and pulled a heavy volume off a shelf. The Witch’s Gilmore. Bound in human-like leather, it had begun to pulse again with warmth—like it remembered its name.

The pages fluttered on their own, stopping at a chapter titled:

“Reclamation: When the Flesh Forgets, the Spores Remember.”

Yarcs’ LED eyes flickered bright green.

His jawbone creaked.

“Round two,” he rasped.

“Let’s see what else is growing in the dark.”

⸻