Civilian Report & Recording #20111104DA - Trick or Treat

RECORD #20111104DA
TYPE: CIVILIAN REPORT AND INTERVIEW
RELATED PERSON(S)/ENTITY(S): Diego Santa Cruz, Dallas Branch Record-Keeper (DSC), Maria Carla, Record-Keeping Assistant (MC), Oscar Brown, civilian (OB), ‘Citra’, presumed pseudonym, suspect (C), Walter Kendrick, victim (WK)
(Recording begins at 5:09 Local Daylight Time, in the Interview Room of the Dallas Branch of the Chatter & Melody Society, 6745 Lakeshore Drive, Dallas, Texas, United States of America.)
(MC) We’ll do the recording in here. The mic’s already on. Name?
(OB) Oscar Brown.
(MC) When did the incident happen?
(OB) On Halloween. October 31st. I swear, I’m not messing with you, I… just couldn’t get here sooner.
(MC) Okay. What are you here to report?
(OB) Uh, transforming bugs, I guess?
(MC) Thank you. You may begin.
(OB) Okay. So, I’ve got young kids, and Halloween is a big deal for them, right? And we live in a neighborhood with a lot of young kids, so almost everyone does trick-or-treating. Me and my wife were at Walmart around the 15th of October to get some candy. She was in the home goods section, and I had just gotten one of those big variety bags of chocolate when I accidentally bumped into a woman who was also buying candy, a big bag of lollipops. I apologized, she said it was no big deal, completely normal, right? That’s what I thought at the time. So I meet up with my wife at the checkout, and everything’s normal. Until we get home. When I was hiding the candy in the cupboards, I noticed that I had a bag of lollipops, not the bag of chocolate I thought I had bought. So then I checked the receipt, and it listed a bag of lollipops. So I reckoned that I had just picked up lollipops, not chocolate, and just wasn’t paying attention. So I put them away and forgot about them until the 31st.
When I went to take out the candy for the trick-or-treaters, I noticed that it was a bag of chocolate again. I went and checked the receipt, which showed that I had bought chocolates. At this point, I thought I was just hallucinating or something benign like that, so I put the chocolates in the bowl and waited for the kids to come. But every time a group came and called “Trick or Treat!”, the bowl would change, from chocolates to lollipops and back to chocolates. At this point I did not trust the candy, whatever it really was, so I started to give out gummies from a separate stash left over from last year. At that point, I’d rather the kids have stale gummies than transforming chocolate-lollipop-who-knows-whatsits. So the night continued, until… she came to my door.
It was getting a bit later, but there were still plenty of families making the rounds, so I was still at the ready with the bowl. When the doorbell rang, I got up and opened the door, expecting another family or group of friends. But she was there. The woman from Walmart, the one who I had bumped into.
She looked, well, kinda relieved that I had opened the door, even though I was probably white as a ghost. She was alone, and dressed up in a frilly historical-looking dress. She barged past me, slamming the door shut. When I whipped around, she seemed to be looking for something, before her eyes caught on the candy bowl of maybe-chocolates or maybe-lollipops.
At this point, I had only given out maybe five from that bowl before I had switched to the gummies, but there were far more than five missing from the bowl. It was half empty.
The woman glanced at the bowl, before she sighed and looked at me. That’s when I saw her eyes. Her long blonde hair had hidden them, but now they were staring straight into mine. She had compound eyes, you know, the sort that insects have. It, well, it freaked me out, to be honest… She asked me in a very calm, almost forcefully so, voice, “How many?”
I responded, almost unwillingly, with, “Five, five to two different families.”
“Oh, well, it COULD be worse, I guess…” She was rubbing her forehead, before walking over to the bowl and putting her hand in. She picked up one of the candies, before saying, “Well, it is my fault. Sorry for the inconvenience. I’ll clean it up before the night’s out.”
Turning to me, she said, “I’m Citra. We’ll be gone before tomorrow morning, all of us.”
Thats when I noticed that the candy wasn’t a piece of chocolate or a lollipop: it was a cocoon, y’know, the sort that butterflies come out of. And the bowl was full of them.
“Oh, don’t worry.” Citra said as I was gaping at the bowl, “They will never harm a human willingly. They just want to go out and live their lives, and to do that, they need something to Mimic.”
I… I think I fainted after that. My wife found me passed out after she returned with our kids, and she took me to the hospital. They had me in the psych ward for four days, cause I was rambling about the cocoons… I never saw Citra again, but I reckon she did what she said she would, as there were two burglaries that night on our street. The newspapers said that nothing was stolen, except for some candy.
(MC) Thank you, Mr. Brown. Please just fill out this contact form so that we can follow up with you.
(OB) Thank you. Oh, I don’t want to press any charges against Citra. She seemed nice enough.
(Oscar fills out the contact form and leaves)
(MC) You can stop the backup now.
(RECORDING ENDS)
(RECORDING BEGINS)
(DSC) Thanks. Follow up begins. Oscar’s account of the burglaries is accurate as far as the police are concerned: nothing but candy stolen, houses were entered through cut screen doors. Suspect described as a tall blonde woman in a frilly costume dress. His description of the cocoons and this Citra’s wording about them needing to Mimic things almost confirms that these were Garden Pests. The behavior of the cocoons is almost identical to that of the grubs in the ‘Exact Change’ case from Chicago a year ago, only without the coin-flipping thing.
(MC) I managed to track down a ‘Citra Wibawa’ in Texas DMV records. Born in Oklahoma to Indonesian immigrants, dropped off the face of the earth besides her drivers license after graduating from high school. Seems she’s taken up with the Mimic.
(DSC) Indeed. I bet that photo isn’t what she really looks like. But she also appears to be focused on raising Garden Pests, which, while annoying, aren’t much when compared to the other things the Mimic can bring, especially Pretty Flowers or Oh So Sweet Water. We’ll send this one on to Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and New Orleans just to be safe. That is all.
(RECORDING ENDS)
(RECORDING BEGINS)
(DSC) Thank you. Addendum. We have traced the movement of this ‘Citra’ into New Mexico. It appears that she released the Garden Pests somewhere outside of Albuquerque, as there were several reports of ‘unusual butterflies’ and ‘exotic bugs’ on iNaturalist from the area. In addition, it appears that at least one of the cocoons was consumed on the 31st of October by a Walter Kendrick, the youngest child of the Kendrick household, which is only three blocks from the home of Oscar Brown. He has gone through the expected stages of metamorphosis and nonpermanent transfiguration before spitting out the adult Garden Pest approximately one week later. He is doing fine, as Ernesto was able to successfully cover up the event, and the Garden Pest is currently stored here in a small terrarium. It resembles a bumblebee millipede and is colored very brightly, as is expected. That is all.