Emphasis On The Monster - Tumblr Posts
Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Monster Girls | Monster Boys, Original Work Rating: Explicit Warnings: Rape/Non-Con Relationships: Original Female Character(s)/Original Male Character(s) Characters: Original Male Human Character(s), Original Monster Girl Character(s), Original Non-Human Character(s) Additional Tags: Horror, Nightmare Fuel, Chases, Extremely Dubious Consent, (at first), Group Sex, Held Down, Impregnation, agalmatophilia, Inspired by The Magnus Archives, Canon-Typical The Stranger Content (The Magnus Archives), Urban Exploration, Ambiguous/Open Ending Summary:
After a trip to a dead mall almost winds up a bust, Josh comes across something he'd never seen before: A completely intact store! Aside from the odd cracking noises the air conditioner kept making, of course; must be malfunctioning. Still, no harm in checking it out, right?
Motes of dust danced in the stale air, the only hints of movement in a space once filled with it. Not anymore, though, and not for a while now. Its last anchor store had closed up shop over a decade ago, yet another casualty of the retail apocalypse. It stubbornly clung to life for another decade, a gangrenous corpse that refused to drop; then the pandemic had put the final nail in its coffin. Now, what had once been a thriving shopping mall lay still and quiet, a brick and mortar carcass devoid of life.
Well, almost, he thought to himself, as he snapped yet another photo of the dust-coated cavities that had once held a plethora of shops, picked clean of anything worth looting long ago. Not that he was interested in grave robbing, of course; cops tended to be more annoyed than angry when all you were planning on taking was pictures. But it was still disappointing; without any of those ubiquitous abandoned goods considered not worth the cost of packing up laying around fresher finds, the only way to tell a Hot Topic from an Abercrombie was the ghosts of logos once emblazoned above them. And, he grumbled to himself, pictures of empty storefronts didn’t get nearly as many views as ones packed with the capitalist equivalent of grave goods.
He’e been through most of the mall at this point, and was starting to lose hope. When he’d first arrived, he’d had such high hopes for it. But so far, this had been his most boring outing in years. The entire place, from the biggest anchor store to the smallest kiosk, had been picked clean by scavengers. Even the decorations, even the signs, had been pried loose over the years since its final days. Nothing but the moldering bones of the mall remained, and without anything to decorate them, they weren’t terribly interesting.
That was when he heard it: A strange sound, one he couldn’t place. It was faint, very faint, but it sounded almost like a malfunctioning air conditioner, the crackling crunch of a fan scraping against its metal guard, or grinding down to a halt. But that shouldn’t have been possible. The power was long since cut off; that’s why he’d come here during the day, instead of waiting for nightfall to hide his entry from the kind of busybodies who felt the need to protect a hollowed-out old ruin from his curiosity. Maybe that last anchor store he hadn’t been to yet had its own dedicated generator? No, if it was still active it would have to be solar; a generator would have run out of fuel by now. Either way, it was promising; sure, the store was probably as empty as all the others, but functioning mall machinery wasn’t something you got to investigate every day.
The moment he turned the corner, he felt his jaw drop. The moment he saw it through the access between the rest of the mall and if, he could tell he’d been wrong. It wasn’t as empty as the others. It wasn’t empty at all. For a brief moment, he felt a jolt surge through his body; it had customers!? No, he realized quickly, as he made his way towards it, it had mannequins. Dozens of generic, white plastic mannequins, frozen in whatever little poses they’d been set of sculpted in, dressed in whatever they’d been trying to sell the day the store closed down. And that’s exactly what it looked like; the only thing he could think of was that the place had been abandoned the moment the store closed, without turning off the lights, without anything even being removed first. Racks of dresses, piles of shirts and pants, and the ubiquitous mannequins; if it wasn’t for the patina of dust covering the store, they’d look as fresh as they say they’d closed down. Hell, from some trick of the air conditioning whirring away in the depths of the store, it looked like some of the mannequins hadn’t even built up that much dust on themselves.
For a while, he simply wandered around in awe, unable to believe the difference between what he’d found and the rest of the mall. Then he got his phone back out, and started to snap pictures. A couple of pearly mannequins strolling hand-in-hand in causal wear here, a trio of lady mannequins walking together in formalwear there, a bunch of little kid mannequins, the same vague suggestions of facial features as the grown up versions, playing together in the children’s section. Many of them in like-new condition, the rest only marred by the ubiquitous dust. And all around them, the rest of the store’s products, just left behind to molder. Not that they had, he thought, with no small bit of confusion. There had to be thousands - tens of thousands - of dollars in merchandise here, just abandoned. He’d never seen anything like it before. Carefully, he turned to snap some pictures of the glass doors he’d had to come though, making sure the ruins of the rest of the mall were in view. Nobody would believe him otherwise. Then, he turned to the big glass doors, sunlight streaming through them, at the opposite end of the store, to make sure and keep anyone from being able to say he’d had enough time to set this display up himself.
That was when he saw her, and his heart skipped a beat.
There wasn’t anything about her that set her apart from the other mannequins, at least not in design. Same smooth, pearly arms and legs, same vague suggestion of facial features on an otherwise blank face. It was her pose, he realized, that drew his eye. Most of the mannequins were in stiff, lifeless poses, standing like someone who’d seen a person waiting in line, once, and tried to reproduce their posture from memory. A few of them were more dynamic: Parodies of walking, talking, even jogging. But her? She was sculpted mid-dance. And if one of the great masters had hand-sculpted her, they couldn’t have gotten the pose more perfect. She looked like the floral dress drooping limply on her plastic body should be caught mid-flutter, like she’d been frozen in a single moment instead of eternally. Honestly, something about the juxtaposition kind of made the back of his neck prickle.
He couldn’t have asked for a more perfect focus for his photos.
He walked around her, phone in hand, capturing image after image of her in angle after angle. He zoomed in on individual parts of her body - hands and arms and legs and face - then zoomed back out to capture the whole of her. He centered her in the frame, capturing her in the middle of what he couldn’t help but think of as her tomb, then placed her in thirds so he could show the contrast between her and the rest of her kind. He almost got lost in the photography, in a way he hadn’t since the first time he’d gone exploring. But, finally, the low battery warning on his phone broke him from his reverie. Dismissing it, he looked down at the last photo, and nodded approvingly. This was going to go viral, he could feel it in his bones.
He froze the moment he looked back up.
Something was wrong. He didn’t know what, but primal instincts long dormant, instincts that kept his ancestors alive long enough to have him, screamed in warning. He looked around frantically, eyes flicking from display to display, mannequin to mannequin, trying to find the source of the ice creeping up his spine. Nothing looked out of place, of course. But, then again, nothing looked out of place when a tiger was lying in wait, about to pounce, either.
It wasn’t until his eyes flicked back down to the light of his phone that the icy chill began to bloom into full-fledged terror. There, that last picture: She’d been looking up towards the mall ceiling, as if gazing at the sky, hand outstretched like she could pluck the sun out of it mid-dance. But now, that frozen face pointed directly at him. It was a subtle thing, given the mere suggestion of features, but now that he saw it, he couldn’t miss it. Something - no, he thought, someone - had moved her between when he took the photo and when he’d finished reviewing it. He hadn’t seen anything. He hadn’t heard anything, aside from the crackle and jitter of dying air conditioning still permeating the store. But nevertheless, in that brief moment, she’d changed positions. Someone else was here with him, and they were - he desperately prayed - an asshole.
When he looked up from his phone again, he almost dropped it with a shriek. She wasn’t dancing anymore. The leg once thrust out into the air now touched the ground, her torso pivoted towards him. Too fast, some part of his brain thought. Even if she was the kind of mannequin you could pose - and she didn’t look it - nobody could have moved her that quickly.
Between one blink and the next, she’d taken a step towards him.
TW: Bugs
A farmer works at their field, the repetitive motion of back-and-forth hacking at the long stalks of corn serving them a kind dissociation from another day’s monotonous work. They look up, wiping the sweat from their brow, before freezing. In the distance is a cloud, but not of the white, fluffy kind; the kind that buzzes and clicks, a peppering of malevolent dots across the sky. What was once a subtle buzz crescends into a great roaring of wings, until the swarm surrounds the farmer now bracing for impact-
but no impact comes.
Instead, out from the cacophany of wings and cantennae clicking together emerges a horribly sweet voice, overlapped a thousand times over:
“OwO, um, m-mway I fweast on dese cwops mwaybe? (´･ω･`) O-ow not, I dwon’t want to bwothew yow... unwess?”
The farmer shrieks in horror.
