Bittybones Chapter 6: Adding to the Bitty Brigade (Buttons 2)
WARNING: Though this chapter is SFW, it contains some mild horror elements. Please read with caution.
I’m paraphrasing the news story because live news tends to contain a lot of repetition and speculation.
My bittys (who perched one on each shoulder) and I noticed the ambulance first, mostly because a human sized lump, hidden by sheets, was being loaded unhurriedly into the back. When the EMTs weren’t rushing, it usually meant that the patient was beyond help. I wasn’t surprised when the reporter announced that a body had been removed from the house; I just wondered what all of this had to do with bittybones.
The home owner, whose name would not be released until his family had been notified of his death, had been a bitty hoarder. He’d been banned from bittybones shops across the city for adopting a large number of Buttontale-type bittybones. Not all shops carry button!bittys because the Papyrus of the pair, called Stitches, can become dangerous if not handled properly. I guess the shop owners figured he had as many of them as he could possibly handle, so they cut him off.
Instead of being satisfied with his unnervingly large collection of potentially dangerous bittybones, he’d decided to start acquiring Blank bittys from the shops that hadn’t banned him yet. That’s where the horror story started. A Bittybones Protection League spokesperson came on-camera to explain that the poor Blanks had had buttons sewn into their eyes by the Stitches bittys. A Sans button!bitty, called a Buttonberry, is created with buttons already present in their eyes, so it doesn’t hurt them. Essentially, this owner was bringing Blank bittys to his home to be tortured by his creepy pets.
The BPL had been investigating the situation when the local police had received a call from a concerned neighbor who’d spotted a Stitches bitty in her yard one night, trying to sew buttons onto her cat’s eyes. The cat had escaped after wounding the Stitches bitty, but the neighbor wanted to press charges. The police had knocked on the owner’s door and gotten no answer. The neighbor informed them that she hadn’t seen the bitty hoarder in over a week. The police became concerned, and when they checked, they found an unlocked rear door and let themselves in.
A slightly green-looking police officer offered commentary on their findings. They’d found the owner dead, which they believed to be of natural causes. However, in the absence of an owner to corral them at night, the Stitches had run wild. They’d sewn buttons onto their dead owner’s eyes and, eventually, over other parts of his partially decomposing body. Facing starvation, some of the bittys had even partially consumed the body. The camera panned away from the cop, who looked like he might puke, and focused back on the BPL spokesperson.
The BPL had arrived to round up the survivors. Many of the Buttonberry and Blank bittys were missing according to sales records from various shops. The news interviewer asked if the bittybones had cannibalized each other, and the BPL member gave her a harried look and stated flatly that there was no way to know the details at this point as the surviving bittys were too traumatized to elaborate on the conditions they’d lived in. The spokesperson also explained that, due to their feral nature, the Stitches could not be rehabilitated and would be humanely destroyed.
Up until that point, my own little bittybones had remained silent, but in the wake of the interview, Red made a sobering comment:
“Monsters dust when they die. The only way to cannibalize another bitty... is to eat them while they’re still alive.”
We turned off the TV after that. I could understand Gigi’s hysteria if she’d been called in to help with that mess. Starving bittys, feral, dangerous bittys, bittys eating other monsters and people? I felt nauseous, and I had only seen it with a television screen to protect me from the harsh reality.
Wordlessly, I started putting away the game of Candyland that sat there, bright and cheery, like it belonged to another lifetime. Red and Brassy nestled against my neck in quiet contemplation. I knocked the top card off of the stack. A purple square faced up at me. It had been my turn when the phone rang. Had I ignored it and picked up the card, I would’ve won the game. Somehow, it didn’t seem so important anymore.
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Blank bitty by gigglesbittyblog
Buttonberry and Stitches bittybones by button-tale
