Story made in reference to “What we have in store”

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[From Victim #003’s Point of View]
It was one of my usual night shifts with four other staff, tasked with unloading crates of special merchandise at a hotel storeroom - plush suits and mascots fursuits made to feel and look like plushies. The hotel acted both as a venue for furry conventions every year in the autumn and a place where people could buy plushsuits from the staff like us for an extra incentive in the business. For me, I enjoyed the job, pulling the cotton-stuffed costumes from the crates to inspect them carefully before bringing them into the hotel. Sometimes, I just found myself irresistible hugging them like giant plushies. It was all enjoyable until the fateful morning.

The time was around 5:00 am when we were receiving a huge crate of plush suits from the truck, wheeling it into the hotel’s warehouse-sized storage room. However, a pinkish note was nailed onto the side that made the whole group of us in the same shift scratch our heads with raised eyebrows. I read it aloud for them to hear, “To the staff at [REDACTED] Hotel, these are unique experimental plush mascot suits with souls. They are alive. Take caution when shifting these suits or they might be prematurely activated from their dormant states. If found in suit, you’ll be taken as a specimen for further testing.” Another staff member snatched the paper from my hands and stared at the words written on it, commenting, “Why would our boss order this? I know we have plush suits as merch, but we’re not gonna be science experiments for these dumb costumes!”

As soon as he expressed his frustration, the storage shutter doors crashed shut and lights switched off completely, plunging us into complete darkness. Voices and giggles emanated from the crates, followed by the sounds of creaking wood and tearing plastic from a few feet away around them. “Oh silly… Our food thinks we’re dumb! Let’s show them how dumb we really are!” Glowing pairs of yellow eyes from the plush suits’ heads illuminated a small area of the storage room as they clambered out of their crates.

I tried to turn on my phone’s flashlight but it only flickered twice before failing to even light up at all. Another tried to take a video of them but was quickly silenced by a muffled punch in the darkness, dragged into another corner behind more sentient costumes. One by one, their unconscious bodies were fitted into their unzipped living plush bodies, their limbs forced into the appropriate sleeves and their heads stuffed inside the mascots’ heads. Once my fellow staff were inside the plushsuits, I knew I could not just stand around and made a break for the shuttered doors.

In a state of panic, I frantically banged my fists on the metallic shutters to get attention and cry for help, only to have plush appendages cover my mouth and pull me back from the exit of the storage room. As I took a breath of the strawberry scented appendage, all the panic signals in my mind suddenly vanished and my head started to spin. The living plush suits held me upright against the wall and cornered me as I saw my inevitable fate of being suited in one of them. Before me were five plush suits: a feline, a snake, a bunny, a goat, and a canine.

While the rest of the suits had been filled up by my colleagues, the bunny turned its back against me, the zipper running along its spine seams descending to reveal a puffy satin interior, so soft and so welcoming, yet the vestiges of my willpower warned me against stepping in. But that silky feeling on my skin, being squished by pillows from all angles was all my mind could yearn for. It was comfort and warmth forever in the plush suit. With my shoes quickly removed and discarded, I entered the suit, allowing the satin to brush against my clothed body.

Each exposed inch of skin that contacted the silky fabric encouraged me to go further as though I wanted to feel more of the plush mascot. I slipped my arms into the bunny suit’s arm sleeves and sighed in bliss as its plush head plopped onto my own. The zipper shot upward, closing me into the belly of the plush suit. Still in a trance-like state, I was oblivious that my body and clothes were dissolving into stuffing to feed the plush suit. Soon, I became nothing but cotton stuffing too, a part of the bunny plush suit’s body. The five living plush suits roamed the hotel’s storage, waiting for their next set of victims to arrive and become their food.

[From Hotel Owner’s Point of View - Epilogue]
As the one overseeing the [REDACTED] Hotel, I would occasionally take suggestions from the staff. However, upon hearing about the noise complaints from the kitchen staff, I noted that there were five missing staff members. They were supposed to check on the plush suits that had just arrived the very morning the complaints were made. I had ordered five discounted plush suits months ago, and it was uncanny that the number of suits matched the number of staff missing. Concerned about the mysterious disappearances, I decided to contact the FBI in desperation, giving them the details of the orders too. With words of reassurance, they told me they would get everything under control and sent their security teams to the hotel for investigations.

However, one team after another, they had vanished too, leaving me with no further information about the whole mystery of the [REDACTED] Hotel. As the week droned on, more and more guests and staff disappeared. When I asked the FBI about the situation, they stated it was now “Classified” information and was not for me to mess around with “serious business” in the hotel I took care of. Still wanting to unravel the mystery, I headed down to the storage room to find out that it was cordoned off by police tapes but left oddly unguarded.

A note had been taped on the police tape, signed off by a staff member who had disappeared on the first day. “Come to the storage party! We’re all chilling in here! I guarantee you’ll love it! - [REDACTED Victim #003]” I ducked under the tape and lifted the steel shutters, staring vacantly at the neatly placed merchandise in the storage room. There were no signs of struggle or anything that could indicate someone had been inside, but one thing stuck out. I had only orders for a single crate of mascots and now, there were at least seven in the room.

I stepped toward the open crates of vibrantly colored mascot suits, hoping to find an answer. The shutters slammed behind me and the lights blacked out all at once. I found myself surrounded by countless pairs of glowing yellow eyes, all gazing in my direction. The previously inanimate plush suits gained sentience and easily cornered me in an ambush. Closing my eyes defeatedly, I was glad I finally solved the Mascot Mystery as part of the whole enigma itself. Soon, I was hugged from all corners and forced into a plush suit myself, my organic body turned into stuffing to provide energy for the cuddly beings and to create more of their kind.
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Without word from the owner or anyone previously working in the [REDACTED] Hotel, it was shut down, cordoned off to the public, except for a few scientists in hazmat suits. While nobody knew what happened exactly, some say the plush mascots were still running the hotel to the very day, keeping their eyes out for new guests of the hotel to wear them.