A woman buys an ordinary yet elaborate witch costu
A woman buys an ordinary yet elaborate witch costume that includes a dress, cloak, and a pointed witch hat. Afterward, she goes home to put it on and admires herself in a mirror before heading to her job at a chemical plant. While at work, she accidentally slips and falls into a vat of acid. Her coworkers assume she has died. However, once everyone has left, she emerges alive, but mutated, with the costume now fused to her skin. She has transformed into an evil witch, with ugly mutated features. She then morphs the chemical plant into a small witch’s hut for her evil experiments.
The velvet of the witch’s costume felt surprisingly luxurious against Elara’s skin. The emerald green dress, the deep purple cloak, the perfectly conical hat – it was an unexpectedly high-quality costume for a Halloween bargain. She admired herself in the mirror, a slightly self-conscious smile playing on her lips. It wasn’t her style, but tonight was different. Tonight, she was going to be someone else. Tonight, she was going to work.
Elara worked the night shift at the Blackwood Chemical plant. The air always smelled faintly of ozone and something else, something acrid and unsettling that clung to the back of her throat. That night, the unsettling feeling amplified. As she hurried past a bubbling vat of acid, her clumsy work boot caught on a loose cable. She tumbled, a silent scream escaping her lips, plunging into the churning, emerald green liquid.
The screams of her co-workers followed, but they were muffled, distant sounds as a searing pain consumed her. Then, nothing. Blackness.
When the last shift worker slammed the door behind him, a low, guttural growl echoed through the cavernous plant. A twisted, grotesquely mutated figure emerged from the acid bath. The witch’s costume was no longer a costume. It was fused to her flesh, a horrifying second skin, its vibrant colors now sickly, corroded hues. Elara’s face was a mask of warped features, skin stretched taut and glistening with a viscous, emerald fluid. Her eyes, once brown, burned with an unholy green fire.
She was no longer Elara. She was something else, something… ancient.
The transformation wasn’t just physical. A chilling power coursed through her veins, a dark magic awakened by the acid’s corrosive kiss. With a flick of her newly elongated, clawed fingers, she began to reshape her surroundings. The towering steel structures of the chemical plant shrunk, twisted, and reformed. The metallic clang of collapsing beams and the groan of twisting pipes were her sinister symphony.
Where once stood a sprawling industrial complex, now stood a crooked, gnarled witch’s hut, its walls woven from twisted metal and bubbling vats. The acrid smell of chemicals was now overlaid with the cloying sweetness of decay and the pungent reek of something indescribably foul – the odor of unholy alchemy.
Inside her twisted new dwelling, Elara, no longer Elara but a creature of vile sorcery, cackled. Her experiments began. She conjured bubbling cauldrons from the remnants of the acid vats, her skeletal fingers stirring concoctions of unimaginable horror. The screams of her victims – imagined, for now – echoed in her mind, a dark music to fuel her depraved work.
The emerald glow of her mutated eyes reflected in the warped metal walls, a promise of terror for anyone who dared to approach the once-familiar chemical plant, now a nightmarish testament to a horrifying accident and a soul irrevocably twisted by the unholy union of costume and caustic acid. The Halloween bargain had cost far more than Elara ever imagined. It had cost her humanity.
