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?’”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “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.”

  ***

  Taking time off was... strange. It was also kind of boring in a... fun way?

  Anyway, let’s not do that again!

  It’s 2022 and I have a whole heap of things I want to do. First, I’m lowering my total wordcount goal from 1,000,000 words to 900,000. Second, I’m now going to take a single week off from writing every 200,000 words. A whole month off was way, way too much. I was going crazy there in the end, both because I had an itch to write, and because I was worried I’d lose all of my readers while not posting anything. It wasn’t ideal.

  Anywho~ It’s now January, which means I’m back on the grind!

  This is the writing and posting schedule for the rest of this month:

  Fluff’ll be starting up in February! I want to build up a bit of a backlog before I start posting, and I want to try a few different starts to the story before I start posting in earnest. There’s also Past the Redline, which should be coming out... uh... one day? No dates on that one!

  In other news~

  Stray Cat Strut is on audible!

  You should really check it out if you like my audiobooks, it’s genuinely great (nearly perfect reviews so far, too!)

  Also, I’ve officially sold Cinnamon Bun, Stray Cat Strut, and Fluff to a publisher, and I might have sold Dead Tired and Lever Action to another, unrelated publisher too! So that’s... really exciting! Expect audiobooks and proper books coming out for all of those soon!

  Oh!

  Since I had a looooot of time to read in the last month, I binged a few stories. I figured I’d share some of them:

  Tricked into a New Life

  This story is trash. But it’s the kind of trash that’s just a lot of fun to read... does that even make sense? Anyway, the start is awful, but eventually it becomes a lot of fun!

  Hero Past the 25th

  A Royal Road story that I had never heard about. It’s kinda fluffy, very silly, and has a few good moments of cuteness. I haven’t finished the last volume yet, but what I’ve read so far has been fun!

  I read a bunch of other stories, but most of those were mainstream things that are popular enough that they don’t need my help endorsing them!

  On that final note, I hope you all had a great holiday season, and that 2022 is an awesome year!

  Thanks for sticking around, and I’ll see you in the next chapter!

  Time for stories!