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Chapter Thirty-One — Plushie Shop!
Chapter Thirty-One — Plushie Shop! “In here?” Charlotte asked. The plushie shop wasn’t in the square. It was just past that, a two-story building, all stone and wood, with an alley tucked in next to it, and a pair of large windows overlooking a pair of tiny rooms at the front where wares could be displayed. There was nothing in them now except for a few bits of furniture sized for dolls, some advertisements for the shop itself, and a single plush doll sitting forlornly on the ground in the middle of the display.The street ahead of the shop was more interesting. There were two large tents, with the seal of the Inquisition printed onto their sides. It wasn’t normal to see that kind of thing installed in the middle of what must once have been a busy street.“Yep, that’s where I’m feeling the stuff from,” Dreamer said. “That’s the plushie shop, right?”“Looks like it,” Charlotte said. “Before we go in, do you sense anything from those tents?”Dreamer shook her head. “No.”“Do you mind if I check inside?”“We have until the Winter Solstice,” Dreamer said. “So it’s okay.”Charlotte chuckled. “I guess time’s not really an issue then.” She carefully removed her sword from its sheath, then used the end to push open the flap leading into the tent.There wasn’t much in there. A few racks with some weapons, more shelves with what looked like reagents and alchemical supplies, and a lot of blood on the ground.Charlotte stepped in, and slowly spun around to take the tent in. “Not much here,” she muttered. She imagined that someone like Abigail might be able to tell a lot from the ingredients, but that wasn’t her speciality.She did grab a small mage-lantern on the way out, one filled to the brim with liquid aether. A flick of the ignition knob on the side and the lantern lit up with a cool blue light. She shut it down and hooked the little light to her belt. “Nothing in that one,” she muttered. “Just going to poke in this one too.”The second tent was an officer’s. There was a desk, with some papers strewn about it, and a few fold-out chairs next to a dresser. Charlotte stepped in, eyed the glass cabinet in the corner and the drinks within it, then decided that the day hadn’t been that weird.She leaned over the desk and eyed the papers. “Oh, this is a winner,” she said.“What is it?” Dreamer asked. She stood on the edge of the desk on her toes to see everything.“Reports,” Charlotte said. They were out of order, but it wasn’t hard to set them up so that the oldest was first. “Looks like... the Inquisition got reports that something strange was going on here.”She flipped to the next page.“Alright, so they sent in some... I guess spies? Plains-clothes watchers to see what was going on. They didn’t see anything, but their tests said that there’s... they call it an ‘anomaly in the smoothness of the fabric?’”A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.“Makes sense,” Dreamer said.“Sure,” Charlotte said. “They poked around and found that a lot of local strays were missing. The owner of the plushie shop, Miss Bouvier, started acting strangely too. When they questioned her in the open, she seemed nervous and hysterical.”Dreamer tilted her head to the side, “Why was she like that?”“I don’t know,” Charlotte said. She scanned the rest of the report, then set it aside and picked up the next page. It didn’t have much more. It took two more before she found something. “She went missing,” She said. “About four days ago. And... the shop was empty when they looked for her. People started going missing that night too.”“That’s not good, right?” Dreamer asked.“I don’t think it is, no,” Charlotte said. “Ah... well, this is weird. It says here that a lot of knitting and clothier supplies started going missing at the same time. The Inquisition suspected an occult movement, and came into the region in force. They quarantined the area.”“Okay,” Dreamer said.“It... looks like some of the plushies came to life,” Charlotte said. “Or someone used some obscure magic to control them from afar. But this next page says that they started laying out traps across the town.”Charlotte lowered the pages after scanning through the rest. There wasn’t much there that was helpful. She stepped out of the tent and looked at the shop again. The doll in the display was gone.“Whelp,” she said. “That’s very creepifying.”“Do all dolls do that?” Dreamer asked.“Not the ones I played with,” Charlotte said. “Do you think we should go in there?”“Sure,” Dreamer said. She walked up to the front door of the shop, then tugged it open.Something twanged within, a whoosh sounded, and Charlotte reached out for Dreamer.An axe swung by, only missing Dreamer’s head because she was so short.Dreamer stared at the axe as it swung back around, its momentum leaving it as it clanked against the door frame and spun on the end of the rope holding it in place. “Is that normal?”“No, no it’s not,” Charlotte said. “I think that whoever’s in that shop wants future guests to be, ah, dead.”Dreamer sniffed. “Abigail said that customers should be treated nicely. Hitting people with sharp metal things is rude.”“That it is,” Charlotte agreed.“Well, I’m going in,” Dreamer said. And with that, she stepped in, tripped over a wire on the ground, and then sighed as a rake snapped around and buried itself spikes-first into her chest. “Dang it, my dress.”“I’m sure we can patch that up,” Charlotte said. “Uh, how are you?”“Just holes in my body,” Dreamer said as she pried the rake out. “Can you make light?”“That... I can, yes.”
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Chapter Thirty-Two — Shedding Some Light
Chapter Thirty-Two — Shedding Some Light Charlotte raised the mage lantern she’d picked out of one of the tents and flicked it on. It glowed brighter and brighter with an ethereal blue light that gently filled the shop, revealing more than what they could see with just the light from the doorway.The shop wasn’t all that big. She imagined that someone that made plushies, even someone who was well-known for it, didn’t make all that much money. There were a few stands where she imagined dolls and plushies would normally sit, and some small decorations next to these, large sewing needles, a few sepia photographs.There was only one plushie in the entire room. A small plushie of a farmboy, with a tiny straw hat on his head and a pitchfork set on his lap. The plush was sitting on the counter at the far end of the room, right next to the till.“Do you see any more traps?” Charlotte asked.Dreamer yanked the rake buried in her chest out, then tossed it aside. She glanced around. “Nope.”“Hmm, well, let’s move carefully anyway,” Charlotte said. “I don’t know if I could resist as many rakes to the chest as you.”“I’m very tough,” Dreamer said. She poked the fingers of one hand into the holes in her chest, then realized that the holes were spaced too far apart, so she had to use both hands to plut the bleeding.Charlotte rubbed Dreamer’s head. “You might want to heal up?”“Okay,” Dreamer agreed. It only took a bit of focus to reknit her body back. Fixing her dress was a lot harder. The fabric could be resewn with a few tiny tentacles, but washing things was tricky, it was why Abigail always did it for her.Charlotte scanned the room for more traps, then grinned as she spotted one. “There’s a tile on the floor there that’s raised up, see that little wire leading out of it. I bet that’s a trap. And there’s a trip wire there too.” She pointed at both.Dreamer summoned a few tentacles out of thin air and smacked both. A brick on the end of a rope came swinging down from the ceiling over the pressure-plate trap, and a box filled with nails twisted together into caltrops fell out of one of the displays and spread out across that corner of the room.“Well done,” Charlotte said. “I’m certain there are more traps, but if we keep our eyes peeled, we’ll be fine.”“Yeah,” Dreamer agreed.Charlotte was feeling pretty confident as they moved into the room. That was, until the door slammed closed behind her.She spun around, hand gripping the hilt of her sword while her eyes darted around the room which was only lit by the lantern swinging in her off-hand, the shadows danced with every swing, and she felt as if she was being watched from every direction.“Oh, what a pretty dress.”Charlotte turned back towards the counter.The farmer boy doll was standing up now, its head tilted to the side slightly. “So so pretty.”Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!“Thank you,” Dreamer said. “Abigail bought it for me.”“But the flesh it’s over. So imperfect. Too warm. It’s a sack of skin over meat and bones. What are you stuffed with?” the doll asked.“I had breakfast,” Dreamer answered.“Uh, Dreamer,” Charlotte said. “Talking dolls aren’t normal.”Dreamer looked up to her, then back down at the doll. “They’re not?”“Not usually, no,” Charlotte replied. She nodded to the doll. “You’re the one that set up all those traps?”“Me? No, Us.” The doll said. He gestured around with his pitchfork and from the shadows came others. Not just dolls, but plushies of cute animals and little figures who walked like stilted clockwork machines.“And what are you?” Charlotte asked. She slowly removed her sword from its sheath, then held it low by her side.“We are our master’s failed creations. Oh! The pain of knowing that you are but a step on the path.” The doll twisted this way and that, its skin of crocheted yarn stretching in strange ways as if its insides wanted to burst out. “Master’s dream will come true. Oh yes, yes it will. But not if we don’t help!”The dolls and plushies started moving closer. A lot of them were armed. Kitchen knives, forks with sharpened tines, a number of them had long needles in their little hands.“Wait,” Charlotte said. “I have a few questions.”“The fresh materials have questions?” the farmerboy doll asked.“Yeah, I do, and while I don’t mind being called fresh, I’m not sure about being called materials, you know?” she asked. “Who’s your master, and how are you all alive?”“Our master is the great craftsman, the maker. They brought smiles to the children with their creations, plushies and dolls so joyous and happy. But they were flawed. We still are, all of us here. Just steps on the path. True joy can only be brought by the living, and we were not, still are not! But the master is improving! New materials were needed for a new generation of dolls!”“They’re being used by a thing on the other side,” Dreamer said. “You know those holes I talked about. There’s small ones in all the plushies here.”“Huh,” Charlotte said. “And how do we fix those?”“Just close the holes,” Dreamer said.The farmerboy doll raised his little pitchfork and pointed it at Charlotte and Dreamer. “Come, brothers and sisters of flesh and plush, let us harvest!”A plush of a cat leapt towards Charlotte’s face, but she sliced it out of the air.It fell onto the ground in two screeching halves, its stuffing-filled interior spilling real blood across the ground.The rest of the dolls screamed and howled as they started to rush them.“Dreamer! Tentacle them! Tentacle them all!” Charlotte said.Dreamer smiled. “Okay,” she said.And then a million tiny holes in reality were torn apart, and a million and more knife-tipped tentacles tore out of those holes, hissing through the air as they sought out plush and stuffing.
* * *
Chapter Thirty-Three — A Customer-Friendly Experience
Chapter Thirty-Three — A Customer-Friendly Experience The first thing to hit Charlotte was the smell.So many things cut apart, so many rotting bodies splashed across the floor of the shop. Stuffing soaked in blood and offal, skin torn apart under a thin layer of felt. The dolls and plushies that had attacked them were filled with once-living meat.“Well,” Charlotte said as she raised her lantern. “That wasn’t pleasant.” She shook her sword to dislodge a bit of doll stuck on the edge of it.Dreamer’s tentacles were retreating back to wherever they came from, leaving behind punctured bodies. “Yeah. Are all plushies like that?”“I think these are the exception rather than the rule,” Charlotte said. “I imagine that this wasn’t all of them.”“I can still feel holes,” Dreamer said. “There’s a big one that way.” She pointed down and towards the south side of the shop.Charlotte drew a mental map of the North hill in her mind, then nodded. “How far?”“About... sixty Abigails.”“Abigail as measured from shoulder to shoulder, or Abigail from head to toe?” Charlotte asked.Dreamer shook her head. “Abigail from hand to shoulder. That’s her patting range.”“Right,” Charlotte said. She mentally converted that to about a metre, give or take. “That would place the big hole at about the middle of the hill. Still below ground too. I imagine you can feel a lot of smaller holes too, right?”“Yeah,” Dreamer said.“Great. More creepy murder dolls.”“They’re easy to kill,” Dreamer said.“That doesn’t make dealing with them any more fun,” Charlotte said. “Come on, let’s keep moving. I bet there’s a way to get to that big hole from here.” They moved towards the back of the shop. A door led into a workshop, one that was about as big as the front store, though with far more tables and workbenches. There were jars of buttons and bags of stuffing, but no incomplete dolls laying around.Dreamer skipped past Charlotte, ignored a spray of needles that she caught on a tentacle, then grinned as she pointed to part of the floor that was cleared of furniture. “There’s a hole here,” she said.“A trapdoor?” Charlotte asked as she walked over. There was a loop bolted to some planks, and a tightly fit square left on the floor that marked out the shape of the trapdoor. A cord was tied to the loop, leading up to the ceiling where a pulley waited. “Must be to allow the dolls to pull it up,” she muttered. She couldn’t imagine the little things being all that strong.They worked together to open the trapdoor. To Charlotte’s surprise, there weren’t any traps that went off when the door was slid off the hole. There was just a darkened pit, with a ladder up against one side and not much else.She brought her lamp out over the hole and looked over the edge. It wasn’t as deep as she’d feared. Maybe three paces down to what looked like a room with a wooden floor.Dreamer stepped over the edge of the hole and crashed onto the ground below with the grace of a sack of potatoes. She pushed herself back to her feet, then looked around. “It’s safe!” she said.If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.Charlotte sheathed her sword and set the lamp next to the hole before climbing down at a more discrete pace. She picked it up once she was almost down, then illuminated the room properly.There wasn’t much to see. Some cobwebs in the corners, a few discarded boxes. The most interesting thing was an old stone-lined well near the centre of the room. She inched over to it. There was water not too far from the lip, and some copper pipes sinking into it. Likely there was some sort of pump in the shop that could draw water up.“There’s a door,” Dreamer said. She was pointing at one of the walls where, indeed, there was a door left ajar.Charlotte moved closer to it, then knelt down next to the entrance. There were markings in the dust. Like cloth gently passed over previously undisturbed ground, and smaller prints too. Not animals. Just round spots in a pattern similar to footprints. “The plushies have moved though here.”“Should we catch one for Abigail’s gift?” Dreamer asked.“I... don’t think that’s exactly the kind of gift Abigail would want,” Charlotte said.“She wouldn’t want a plushie?” Dreamer asked.“Oh, sure, but not one that’s... sapient? Sentient? I’m not sure. Certainly not one filled with rotten meat.”“Okay,” Dreamer said.Charlotte tore the door open while making sure to keep herself behind it. Nothing happened. She poked her head around, and squinted into what was clearly just a corridor.There were more doors in the passageway. They weren’t evenly spaced, and not all of them were closed. Charlotte caught a glimpse of other basements, some of them filled with crates, other barren.“It’s an underground access way to all the shops in the city?” Charlotte asked.There were large pipes running along the ground, always at just a slight angle. One was leaking, and the faint stink that hit her clued her in.“It’s the sewage system. That, and I guess a sort of accessway to different buildings. Strange.”“It’s warm,” Dreamer said.“Yeah, we’re below ground. I guess. That means it’ll be warmer.”Something rumbled out ahead, and Charlotte paused, heart beating in her throat.She was swept up in this sudden feeling of vertigo, as if the world was twisting on its side, but there was no such motion. Nothing had moved. She swallowed, pressing down the foreign emotion, the overbearing sense of wrongness trying to slip into her mind like a distant whisper.“Smells like poop in here,” Dreamer said.“Y-you don’t feel that?” Charlotte asked.Dreamer looked up to her. “You mean the unending wrongness, the sense that you are tiny, a speck caught in a whirlwind drawing you ever closer to a single, tiny point in space where everything that you are and were will be ripped apart into nothing?”“Uh... yeah,” Charlotte said.“Nope,” Dreamer said. She grabbed Charlotte’s hand. “Come on. I think there’s weird stuff that way.”
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