Trivia

Magic Type

• Pumpkin Head uses light magic, which is one out of the two types of magic out there that exist.
• There’s dark magic and then there’s light magic. Light magic is the type of magic most commonly used by most magical girls.
• Light magic (as well as dark magic) is effective against Beasts. It doesn’t work as well against humans, but it can still hurt a lot and you can possibly die from being attacked by it. The feeling of being struck by light magic is like being extremely electrocuted or struck by lightening. It’s quite the shock (pun intended).

Weapons

• Primary Weapon: Throwing grenades disguised as candies. The candy shown in the pumpkin basket she usually carries around are actually explosives. Some candies are even smoke bombs, which she would use to distract and confuse an enemy.
• Her explosives, depending on what color the candy wrapper is, can vary in intensity and explosiveness.
• For example, the candies in her basket that are in red wrappers are, on an easy-to-hard spectrum, a medium, neither easy nor hard. They’re enough to kill an enemy if it’s a direct hit, but not enough to take down a giant (if giants were to exist in this universe, since they don’t).
• Meanwhile, any candies she has that are in black wrappers are super extreme explosives that can blow up an entire room. If she wants to destroy an entire building, she just needs several of those black candies.
• Candies in white wrappers are smoke bombs.
• Candies in orange and white striped wrappers are small and harmless explosives that only make a loud pop at most. They’re used to just startle people or to pull pranks with.
• Then again, she doesn’t go by this colored system very strictly and it’s not the only thing she follows. While the colored candy wrappers indicating which is which is true, she also has some random candies in her basket that look so completely different and random that they don’t follow this colored wrappers system. Only she knows which purpose those types of candies serve, whether they’re medium in explosiveness or just harmless fun. Pumpkin does this so that no one can recognize her colored candy wrappers system, if at all.
• Secondary Weapon: Pumpkin Head can also summon a revolver that can shoot special types of bullets that contain a sliver of light magic inside of them. She doesn’t use the revolver that often since summoning a weapon through a light magic spell would require her to chant a Latin phrase, which counts as speaking and she doesn’t usually use her voice. It is believed that the first magical girl to ever exist lived in Ancient Greece and spoke Latin and that’s why magical girls nowadays have to use the language while casting their spells.
• The phrase Pumpkin usually has to say depends on what kind of thing she wants to summon while performing a light magic spell. If she wants to summon more candy in her basket, and she usually has a limit of thirty candies in her basket, she’ll shout out the word candies in Latin while trying to summon a bunch. If she wants to summon her revolver, she’d shout out the word revolver in Latin.
• She usually has to have a hand touching the insides of her pumpkin basket in order to summon anything through a light magic spell. Doing a light magic spell also just requires her to concentrate on a mental image of what she wants while commanding for it in Latin.

Strengths

• Pumpkin Head is good at long-range fights. It’s easy for her to just plant an explosive somewhere and watch something go boom.
• She’s also quick to make an escape or to dodge something. It’s in her muscle memory to learn how to evade or slip through an attack quick. She knows that she doesn’t need to learn how to react so fast, considering how she can’t be killed anyway unless she reaches the 500+ year mark, but she doesn’t like to experience the pain of getting hit, stabbed, etc.
• Because she’s a magical girl destined to live out the next five hundred years of her semi-immortal life protecting the world, she doesn’t need to eat or drink anything in order to function. There’s no such thing as dehydration or starvation for her.
• Like all magical girls, Pumpkin Head has some super strength, though it’s not Superman-level super strength. It’s just enough for her to be able to lift up an entire bus if she has to.
• And like all magical girls, Pumpkin has supernatural healing powers and can survive a stab or bullet wound easily, though in order for her body to heal her energy needs to be taken up. As a result, whenever she needs to heal a wound, she gets tired right after that.

Weaknesses

• Pumpkin is less skilled at close-range fights. Anything to do with personal combat is out of her expertise.
• Though she can whip out her revolver from her pumpkin basket and use it if she has to, her revolver only has six rounds and if she wants to restock on ammo, she has to actually use a light magic spell. But like all magical girls, using a light magic spell can slowly chip away at your energy.
• Since she doesn’t use her revolver as much, her aim isn’t the best either. It’s gotten a lot better over the years, since she’s had 60+ years since becoming a magical girl to practice, but it’s not amazing and has a 20% of being inaccurate.
• She may know how to disarm someone with a knife, but the chances of her successfully doing that is 50/50 since she doesn’t specialize in close combat and can’t even wield a knife herself all that well.
• Just because she’s semi-immortal doesn’t mean that she doesn’t get sore muscles or need rest after a long night of fighting crime. Her body needs time to heal before working to its full potential again.
• She has some super strength, but it’s limited. Anything that’s heavier than a bus, like a building, is something that she can’t manage on her own.
• She also can’t turn purely concentrated light magic into a bow and arrow like some magical girls in her world can. She doesn’t know how to direct light magic from her fingertips all that well in general.

Berserk Mode

• Berserk mode is a dangerous mood that any magical girl can enter if she’s so exhausted and overworked to the point where she loses all control of her consciousness and rationality. It’s rare for a magical girl to enter berserk mode, since it’s highly advised to avoid being in that state of mind, but if a magical girl happens to enter berserk mode, she would be ten times more stronger than when she was in her magical girl form.
• The chances of Pumpkin ever entering berserk mode are very rare since she rarely ever uses her light magic. The only times she’d ever use her light magic is whenever she runs out of candy or needs to restock on ammo when using her pistol a lot.
• When in berserk mode, Pumpkin is worse than the monsters that she’s supposed to eliminate.
• In berserk mode, all of her candy wrappers turn black and she’ll want to wreck and blow up everything in her way.
• When a magical girl is in berserk mode, all she wants to do is destroy everything that’s in her path, no matter who or what it is. She’ll be blind to her rage and she won’t stop unless she either passes out from using up all her strength (though that could take hours or even days) or gets tranquilized.

History

Pumpkin Head is 74-years-old. She’s a Caucasian adult woman, though she became a magical girl when she was 12. Basically, she’s a grown-up stuck in a 12-year-old body.

Unlocking the ability to become a magical girl usually happens to girls from the ages of 14-16. (Sometimes even 12, like in Pumpkin’s case.) They are made when a previous magical girl dies after around half a millennia (because 500+ years is when their powers start to expire and they die out) and a new one has to take her place.

Whenever a magical girl dies, her magical powers get transferred to another random teenage girl so that she can continue and carry out the cycle. No one knows the exact reason for why this happens or where magical girls even originated from, but magical girls have been around since the creation of humanity. Some say that a magical girl is an angel from God born to serve as humanity’s savior.

Pumpkin Head was born on October 31, 1945 in a low-income family. Her parents were in an abusive relationship and both of them often took out their anger on Pumpkin.

Her father was a jobless gambler swimming in debt while her mother was a waitress and constantly cheated on him with countless side partners behind his back.

Her parents were only still together because getting a divorce would cost money.

When she was a toddler, Pumpkin used to be a really talkative kid. As a baby, she used to cry a lot too. That changed, however, when her parents started hurting her for every time she would babble or talk too much. They’d slap her, hit her, yank on her hair, etc.

After suffering many of their punishments, Pumpkin learned to not talk that much. It was easier to stay silent and suffer less punishment than to express her feelings but suffer more punishment.

One day, someone tried to abduct her while she was alone in the park late at night. She was alone at the park because she had ran away from home after her parents had gotten into another one of their heated arguments. This wasn’t her first time running away and she usually always went back home the next day anyway, once the argument between them would’ve long died out.

The man who tried to abduct her was trying to force her into human trafficking. Basically, he wanted to kidnap her and sell her for child prostitution.

When she tried to run away, he pinned her down and threaten to cut her face with a knife to intimidate her. Luckily, someone was able to witness what was happening and call 911 before things could escalate.

The reason for why she wears a pumpkin head all the time is to hide a scar that she received after a certain incident that happened to her before she became a magical girl at the age of 11. She thinks that her pumpkin head draws less attention than her actual face, which no one has ever seen before.

She accidentally burned her face one day while cooking with grease unsupervised and that’s how she ended up with a big scar that she likes to cover up with her pumpkin head.

Present Day

She shortly and randomly became chosen to be a magical girl one day on her twelfth birthday. After being chosen, she left public school for good, cut off all ties with any family she had, and decided to focus 100% of her attention into being a magical girl. She would train to be a magical girl and dedicate her night shifts to fighting Beasts and criminals.

She lives in a world where these muddy, shape shifting monsters called Beasts exist. Beasts are born from human hatred, so basically as long as humans exist they’ll always exist too.

These Beasts like to cause chaos in the world just because that’s what they exist to do. They like to vandalize property and destroy homes because that’s what their purpose in life is. As a magical girl, Pumpkin’s job is to eliminate them.

Money-wise, being a magical girl as her night job is enough to keep her living a simple life.

Although Pumpkin was born and raised in Ficta, Pennsylvania, once becoming a magical girl, she traveled across the states for employment, learning how to fight and train in different places. She moved to New York after becoming a magical girl, a place crawling with criminals and burglars. The workload was very laborious there and Pumpkin originally had to work all day shifts, basically both morning and night times.

After two years of being employed in NY, she was then able to move to Massachusetts with her savings and stayed there for about twenty years. Within those twenty years, she made a lot of acquaintances — though never any close friends — while still working all day shifts.

Once her 34th birthday hit, she took a break from fighting crime and being a magical girl in general. By then, she was exhausted from those 24/7 all-day shifts and decided to just take a vacation across Europe and Canada. She did this for an entire year before diving back into the workforce again once she felt all vacationed out and had spent too much money during her travels.

Pumpkin then decided to take only morning shifts for a while once returning to Massachusetts again. She would only work in the mornings, then learn sign language by night because she’d always wanted to learn sign language even before becoming a magical girl. She continued this routine for two more years before getting bored and randomly deciding to move to Ohio for a random change of pace.

After migrating to the state of Ohio in a really small town, she started working night shifts there just to see what that was like while enjoying her mornings off. She did this for three more years before moving again since she got bored again, but this time she went back to her hometown Ficta. At this point, she hadn’t been to Ficta in 28 years and had only gone there just out of curiosity’s sake. Pumpkin wondered if anything had changed since her departure.

She grew to like working in the law enforcement for the small city of Ficta since it had just the right amount of work for her. Not too overwhelming, like NY, but not too slow either, like Ohio. Massachusetts had been just right and she does still go there every now and then just for a change of pace, but she was growing more comfortable with staying in Ficta at that point and had decided to just remain there for a while. Plus, she’d gotten closer to some of the co-workers that she’d met in Ficta and wanted to maintain that kind of routine. Her co-workers in Ficta respected how she didn’t speak much or ever reveal her face to the public. Meanwhile, she only had a lot of acquaintances that thought she was a bit weird back in Massachusetts.

Now, flash forward almost three decades later, and here Pumpkin Head is, working night shifts as a magical girl in Ficta, Pennsylvania.