A toy shop proprietor sells plushie Cthulhu toys and cartoonish picture books, spreading joy to the children of his fair city in mockery of a century dead antiquarian.
Only, the toys begin whispering in the night, the picture books reveal quite starkly arcane hidden messages under moonlight, and one mother complains of a plushie leaking blood, the proprietor realizing too late what he's really been spreading... -- Anon Guest
The toys looked pretty cute. One of the selling points on the packaging declared that each one contained a small pebble plucked from the undersea region of R'lyeh. It could have all been horseshit. Most of the customers certainly believed it was.
After all, R'lyeh was a made up place. Wasn't it?
Fans bought them. Goths bought them. Nerds bought them. People who liked plush sea creatures bought them. Weird little kids insisted on getting them. In brief, they sold like hot cakes. The toy and curios store selling them did wonderful business.
Until the issues began coming to the fore.
People who had them in their bedrooms had their dreams changed. Some light sleepers reported whispering in the night. One child complained because their toy was drooling blood. Another customer complained that its display cabinet was filling with a fishy-smelling slime.
Some customers started babbling esoteric language fragments in their sleep.
R'lyeh was real. A not-so-secret range of underwater structures that were perfectly natural if one asked an undersea expert. The rock samples were real too. In a lab, they were boring and uninteresting fragments of gravel.
But stitched inside a felt heart...
Nestled into an effigy with great lore and belief behind it...
Even if many considered it a joke...
Belief made things more real than they aught to be.
The urgent recall went out, and roughly ninety-eight percent of the toys came back to the manufacturer. It was the last two percent that was concerning.
...and the rise of weird underground clubs associated with disappearances, all in areas where the last of the toys were supposed to be.
[Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash]
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