Ch. 1. A Table Is Found
The sun poked through a a thick tangle of branches and trees that lined every inch around the wayward path Gwen had decided to take. It was a particularly hot day for the October Thursday it was. It was never this hot this time of year but lo and behold the heat persisted. Gwen had always gone to the trails that were about 4 blocks from her parents place after she would get out of work or just to walk around for a bit but this time was different. This time she wasn’t out to destress or just kill some time before a get together. This time Gwendolyn was looking for something. a thing an old friend she had gotten in touch with mentioned to her.
She stopped at a collection of tree stumps that was surrounded by tall grass, setting aside her backpack and taking a swig of the water she had brought with her she looked at her phone. She could see that her mother was already asking if she’d be able to go an accompany her to her dead best friends child’s birthday. She rolled her eyes and texted that she would, she hated talking top those people of hers who always looked in a state of perpetual mope as she liked to call it.
Gwen pulled her long brown hair back into a ponytail and clipped her water bottle to her backpack and looked for a sign of where she should head off to since there seemed to be a three way split in the path and not much else. She comically scratched her head and and then took a step back only to trip over a piece of brush.
she was glad no one was around for a bit to see her lose to nature so suddenly. She knew she had a striking feature and by that she meant she was definitely something to gawk at as most people tended to do.
She was a long 5’6 with no meat on the carcass making her look like the lanky deer to most since she was also a “timid” as her close friends would like to say. Her nose was longer than she liked and her eye were wide as all hell with the whole lank amalgamation being forced to call itself Gwendolyn Miers every day.
Now Gwen had just recently moved back in to her parents place since she went through a markedly weird breakup with her boyfriend. In her infinite wisdom she dropped everything and moved to a city four hours away from her hometown and tried to set up a life with this guy but in the end it was a weird slow spiral that ended at her parents driveway. She spent 1 year doing Doordash deliveries and then half a year with a crippling drug addiction.
The thing she hated most was she was now looking like a freaking skeleton draped in skin. She had been a little depressed and spent much of her time on her phone in different parts of the house filling out application s for employment wherever she found them online. At the age of thirty, she saw her life to be a big sigh of “meh” and so when she started to chat up her old friend Clair from around the block, she had piqued her interest with the mention of a thing called the color table ritual.
Now Clair and Gwen since high school always were the type to love a good ritual here and there, you know the type you do at slumber party things. They had tried all the obscure and silly rituals that were meant to conjure demons to open up gateways to mirror dimensions, which none of them ever worked. They were still non the less fun things to do with your bestie, usually with the two of you getting drunk.
When Gwen mentioned that she was feeling down and that she didn’t know how to begin to feel better, that’s when Clair said " You know Gwen, I was recently kinda sad and was like just moping around until i went for a little trip and did the color table ritual" Gwen remembered staring at the phone for a bit waiting for the joke, but it never came. "Color table…ritual? whatcha mean? is it like a new drug er what?', she asked her friend. “No you dumbass, its this cool thing I found not too long ago when I ended up getting out of county and had nowhere to go cuz I was fighting with my mom. Kinda just went through the dip in the trail where it looks like it doesn’t keep going, under the vines and straight shot up ahead. Try going out there and see what’s up, anyways I gotta go pick up my aunt from the adult daycare”. With that Clair never texted back.
Gwen knawed on the info for about a day before she scraped her unemployed ass off her bed and packed up for the excursion to the trails. “Cmon Gwen you got this, plus you could use the exercise”, this did nothing to prepare her for the treacherous path Clair sorta kinda let her know about. “Christ Clair, what the fuck were you doing way the fuck out here” she muttered under her breath. She wore basketball shorts, and a black tank top, but had no bug spray, she hated her life right now.
Staring at the three way split she was about to walk down the one on the right when she heard something like a small voice. It couldn’t be though, “way out here?” she thought to herself. She hunched herself over to go into the brightly lit tunnel of shrub growth. Gwen followed the sound for a bit but came across nothing except a wider collection of bushes lining the path with twisted vines jumbled all about. She looked to the sky and see that it was free of clouds.
A bush trembled up ahead with a loud squeak to accompany it.
“Huwwy! babbeh’s am scawdies!”
“Wun! scawdies!”
Gwen crept closer to the wiggling bush but stopped when she heard the most annoying squeals emanate from said bush. When she came upon the shrubbery, she parted a bit of it to the side and her eyes went wide with a sudden furrowing of the brows when she smelled the things piling up and quivering in front of her.
“What am I looking at here?” she asked herself while she tried to lean in for a closer look to see what was underneath the rest of the bush. Before she knew it the bush let out to another clearing behind it. It really opened up to like a private little enclosure that went on like a dark hallway with all the growth zig zagging in every which direction. As she stepped forward to get into the nature room a loud cry was heard underneath her. A tiny pink fuzz colored thing was trying to claw away from her foot that was crushing its back leg.
“Huwties!! Mummah hewp babbeh!!” the pink thing cried out with eyes full of tears and drool falling off its chin.
“Oh yeah, I remember hearing about these freakin things! That people were like in love with these weird dog rat bio toys that spoke gibberish… I think they were called fluffies…”.
Once she was onto the other side of the bush she noticed that there were four big fluffies of red, blue, yellow, and orange tied to a giant root that jutted from the ground. there were also three little ones of red, pink, and blue that huddled near the bigger fluffies.
“Babbeh come tu mummah, mummah may bad huwties go way!” the blue mom fluffie called out to the pink injured foal that was weakly trying to make its way back to its mother.
Gwen walked down the area marveling at how good the walls of branches made up a semi full wall, from floor to ceiling. She came to the end of the little hallway to an area that held a lone wooden table that sat alone on a dirt floor. A fire pit surrounded by some heavy river stones made a crooked circle around it but besides that, there wasn’t much to look at. she turned around and her sight went from milk crate to milk crate that lined the hallway up to the table. she sat down on the green one next to her and jumped up when she felt it rattle underneath her.
“Nu! pwease! huuu!” a tiny voice said from the dark inside of the upside down milk crate.
“What the…” she exclaimed as she flipped the thing over and saw a lone brown foal that looked emaciated that had a collar and leash tied to a stake in the ground. on the collar it had something rolled up.
Gwen wrinkled up her nose as the smell of the thing was a pungent blast as she reached for the cowering thing.
“Nu huwties!”
She was able to eventually yank the rolled up paper wrapped in plastic and held together with duct tape. She unrolled it to see that it was a list with five stars labeled throughout the page. she looked on the back but there wasn’t anything else on it.
*1. Gather five foals, no more no less
*2. Make them panic for three days
*3. After, create pain unending for three more days
*4. One foal must break, in mind on sixth day
*5. Cook and Consume on seventh day
“Cook and consume?? What the actual fuuck Clair!?” She said sort of half laughing to herself out loud. She thought this might have been a prank set up by that ol rascal Clair but then as her vision fixated around the area behind the brown foal she noticed that it had scars and wounds on it and pieces of its ears missing. The area in fact around it was littered with small bones that she could only guess were of other fluffies, small ones by the looks of it.
“No huwties, da stuff ams ovew thewe! Huuuu!” the tiny thing cried out as it hid it’s face underneath one of it’s hooves. With the other hoof it pointed towards the red crate next door to it.
“Hmm, let’s see”. Gwen lifted up the other crate and saw there was a yellow medium sized fluffy laying on its side on what seemed to be a satchel of some kind. She scooted the shallow breathing thing off to the side and off the brown satchel so she could open it. The weak looking yellow fluffy only looked with a weird stare as it was now facing her. Inside the heavy satchel she found an assortment of cutlery and a cutting board made to be of a slab of wood straight from one of the trees nearby with how wonky it looked. A brown leather apron and a half pack of cigarettes menthol were all that was left. “Well this was underwhelming as fuck” she said as she started to take a step back.
"Who ams dat mummah?
“Ams dey hewe wid nummies fo famiwy?!”
“Mummah babbeh ams scawed!” was allk she started to hear all at once as she could now see and hear that all the milk crates had fluffies underneath them.
Gwen had only brought a bag of chips in her useless backpack and her water was already done so she decided to head back to her house since she was really deep in the trails.
“Nu weave! Mummah nee nummies pwease!” a green fluffy pleaded as it tried to waddle behind Gwen. All she did was take off as she couldn’t stand the flies eating her alive anymore mixed with the weird situation, it was all a bit much to take in. She just knew that she need to see what was up with her buddy pal to make sure this wasn’t a lame joke.
