Pt 6- https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/15u1njh/trapped_in_the_dollar_general_beyond_pt_6_training/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Hey everyone, hope you’re still reading these (or even seeing them).
It’s been an interesting little journey so far and I thought it might be past time for an update.
Gale and I have been traversing the stores, getting supplies and mapping the different set ups, and I’ve seen more stores in the short time I’ve been with Gale than I had in all the time I was on my own. I’ve seen places where the shelves are made of smoke, I’ve seen places where the ceiling and floor are reversed, and I’ve even seen stores I think might be on another planet. The languages vary in many of them, and some of them aren’t even dialects I think are native to Earth.
I’ve made some notes on them and I hope to write them down for you a little later, but for now I have to tell you about something that’s led us to think we might not be the only ones who can travel through intent.
We had gone back to KK, practicing my movements, and I was getting ready to go to another one when Gale stopped me.
“Something is wrong,” he said, looking around. He was looking around as if expecting to see something obvious, but the answer wasn’t quite that simple. The store wasn’t what you would call in any kind of order, and it reminded me of the store I had trashed. Shelves were moved, things were tossed about, and the mess was everywhere. Gale could talk about not wrecking the stores, but it appeared he had done just that to his own first stop. As such, it took us a couple of minutes to notice that the sign in the window was missing.
Someone had taken it down and torn it in half.
Gale looked at the pieces in confusion, not sure what to make of it, but looked to the breakroom as if the culprit would still be in there.
They weren’t, but they had left their handy work there as well.
They had ripped the bulletin board down and smashed it in the floor.
Gale stood looking at it like someone had desecrated a grave, and I could see him trembling in barely contained rage.
“Who’s done this?” he whispered, his voice full of pain, “Who has torn down my board?”
He picked it up, checking over the ruined front, as I started looking for clues.
There wasn’t much to go off, but I did find a couple of things that the perpetrator had left behind.There was a scrap of cloth that had gotten caught in the door when whoever it was had left. There was a shoeprint on the wall under the spot where the board had been, the tread visible as if it had been made by something gross. The last tied it all together, and the smell of it made me gag a little as it hit me.
Someone had taken a dump in the floor near the managers desk and then trod through it on their way out the door.
“Friggin animal,” I said, covering my nose as I took a step back.
I bumped into Gale then, and he seemed to have seen it too.
He took the bulletin board back with him, but the damage was definitely done.
I asked him if he had any idea who could have done this, but he didn’t seem to have an answer. He sat looking at the board, the cork board the only reminder of his lost friends, and I wondered if he was going to be okay. Someone, or something, had gone in and wrecked his remembrance plaque. I say something because as far as we knew we were the only people who could travel with any accuracy. If there were others then why hadn’t we found them yet?
I sat with him for a little while, hoping he would snap out of it.
After a while, though, I decided to leave him to his thoughts.
I’d go and find something to make to cheer him up, a nice meal or something sweet, and hopefully he’d be back to his old self.
I was heading to WW, a very special place that I discovered before meeting Gale but didn’t entirely understand. When I first came to it, the floor didn’t feel right and the whole place smelled like food. When something dripped onto me as I stood studying it, I immediately went through again and stepped out onto XX. I told Gale about it after we met and he laughed and offered to take me there. When he showed me the true nature of the place, though, I understood what a cool store I had run from.
Here, I’ll show you my journal entry on it, maybe that will shed some light on the situation.
WW (Sweet Store)
Designation- Low to No Danger
People- None
Theme- Dessert Shop
WW is a store made entirely out of dessert items. The shelves are made of chocolate, the floors of marzipan, and the ceiling drips with endless whip cream. Everything there is edible. All the packages, the products, even the walls and furniture are fit for consumption. It’s a great place to find a sweet treat.
Pretty cool , right?
There really is a store for everyone.
I closed my eyes and prepared to step through, wanting to grab something sweet, but as I stepped through, I thought I had made a mistake. I still stepped into the wrong Dollar General about twenty percent of the time, I’m far from perfect, but as the overwhelming smell of chocolate assaulted my nostrils, I realized I had gone to the right place after all. The walls, the shelves, the floor, they were all still made of confection, but their composition had changed drastically.
Most of the shelves lay in chocolate shambles. The packages that were uneaten had been scattered or stomped on and their contents were spread across the floor. The packages left smears across the ground and the smears were worked deep into the marzipan. The ceiling was untouched but it was a little bit out of reach. The mess was impressive, like something a wild animal might do when cornered and trying to escape, and I started looking for a source of all this destruction. It seemed familiar somehow, like a place I had seen before, and I felt the hairs prickle on my neck as I went. I found a candy cane of all things lying by the base of a shelf and held it firmly between my hands as I went deeper into the store.
As I rounded an aisle, I saw something skuttle out of sight.
As my foot came down in an extra thick splat of whipped cream, I heard the skitter of something that ran along on all fours.
I kept checking my peripherals, listening for the subtle scrape of feet, and when something finally lunged at me, I brought the hooked end of the candy bludgeon around and cracked the end on the face of my attacker.
I brandished the broken tip, ready to fight whatever had come for me, but it was the last thing I expected to find sprawled on the floor.
It was him, the hermit.
He was righting himself, getting up on his hands and knees and hissing at me like a wild animal. His grimey clothes were smeared with chocolate and food and his hands were caked with the store’s leavings. He seemed more feral than he had the last time I’d seen him, and when he threatened to lunge again, I shoved the broken end of the candy cane at him and he scampered back smartly.
“Get back,” I yelled, and for a wonder he did.
He ran for the bathroom and plunged through the door, leaving the store in disarray and leaving me with questions.
I traveled to XX, following on his heels, but he was nowhere to be found.
There was no way that he could travel like Gale and I could, but I supposed that would explain how he had gone to Gale’s old store and messed up his board. It seemed impossible, the guy was crazy, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it had to be him. Who else could it be? We’d encountered no one besides the Hermit, and if it wasn’t him then the prospects seemed even more fearful.
I went back to DGB 0 to give Gale the bad news and found him seated at the desk we’d put together and fixing his sign.
“I ran into the hermit,” I told him when he didn’t look up.
“What the hell were you doin in FF in the first place?”
“He wasn’t in FF,” I said, hesitating a little as he looked up in confusion, “I was in WW. He’s made a real mess of it.”
Gale sat back and I could see that he had recreated the board as it had been when I’d first seen it. The warnings, the story, the pages of remembrance to his old friends, they had all been lovingly recreated and it did my heart good to see it restored. It deserved to be here, anyway. IT was important to Gale and we should have protected it.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Gale said, “He’s never shown any inclination about leaving before. He’s always stayed in FF for as long as I’ve known him.”
“Are you sure about that?” I asked, “When I showed up there wasn’t a lot of food left and there’s no way he’s been living there all this time without a source of food.”
Gale shrugged, “I never thought about it like that. Mostly I just avoid FF because that’s where I’ve always encountered him. I guess he must be traveling, but how does he know how to get back is what I want to know. It’s not impossible, but he’s about half crazy. You can’t tell me that a guy like that can figure out how to travel with any real destination.”
“I dunno,” I said, “How long has he been here, anyway?”
“He was the first person I encountered when I set out traveling, and I had been traveling for quite some time when I met him. I don’t know if he was here before me, but Isuspect that he might have been. I guess maybe he wasn’t always crazy, but that’s just speculation. Any rate, if he’s wrecking up the stores then we need to stop him. Like I told you once, there’s no proof that the store, or the resources they hold, are infinite. If we’re going to survive here then we need to stop him from making that harder.”
“Whats the plan then?” I asked, but that’s where todays story ends.
Gale and I are creating a plan to stop the old guy from wrecking up the stores, but its something we have to approach carefully. He’s crazy and dangerous, and if we don’t want to get hurt or killed then we can’t go in half cocked. Gale has started keeping a close eye on our Dollar General, and we’ve started going into other stores with weapons. If he attacks us, we’ll be ready.
Hopefully, we can take him alive.
As promised though, here are a couple of excerpts from my store journal.
AA (Upside down store)
Designation- Low danger
People- None
Theme- upside down
This store is like a regular store, only upside down. The shelves stay on the ceiling and the food doesn’t fall off them and come up so there must be some sort of weird gravity/ Gravity doesn’t seem to have reversed for us, however, so we walk on the ceiling and find all the shelves unreachable. Gale, however, suggested using a step ladder and its possible to reach high enough to “pick” some of the items down to us. The place makes me dizzy if I spend too much time there and its a real trip.
S (Street Store)
Designation- moderate
People- shadow drivers
Theme- Street Fair Shop
S is a perfectly normal street with booths set up that have items. Its all still inside, but the ground is concrete and there are garbage cans and street lamps and graffiti in odd areas. The only real danger present is that sometimes cars drive up the road part of the street. They don’t go very fast and they’re not hard to get out of the way of, but if they hit you, it could kill you or hurt you. The shadow people who drive them look like living shadows and they don’t get out so they aren’t any trouble. As long as you stay out of the center of the street, then you should be fine. The food is normal but aside from shelves there are also these odd little food stalls that just seem to have cooked food in them. You shout what you want into the stalls and if they cook it then you can just watch it make itself. It’s wild, but a nice little change up from the norm. The stalls have a finite amount of resources but if they run out of food then they put out a CLOSED sign. There are eight “streets” and they have side walks beside the shelves. The cars don’t seem to come from anywhere in particular and don’t seem to go anywhere either. The exit is a tunnel with a crossbow blocking it off. I’ve talked to Gale about going into the tunnel to see whats on the other side but he is staunchly against it.
Pt 8- https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/16113t1/trapped_in_the_dollar_general_beyond_pt_8_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3