On a set of shelves were dozens of perfectly arranged little plush toys, illuminated by the sun shining between the beams of a single curtainless window. It's certainly been a while since anyone had been in here, but they were much less dusty than they could be. Hard to believe that with all the furniture cleared out of this old place, these of all things were left behind. At least they weren't the most difficult things to clean up if they needed to be moved. Imagine if the old homeowners had left behind their glassware collection!

"Dad, look at how cute this one is!" My new stepdaughter said, picking up a strange yellow rabbit with rosy red cheeks from the collection. "You didn't tell me the house came with cool stuff!"

I glanced over the rows of toys myself with a decidedly less enthusiastic expression. Some of them were relatively straightforward. . .ish, pretty pink princesses and boyish blue princes, dragons and knights and a happy plush dog. Then they started getting stranger, one being an unsettling monochrome save for an awkwardly contrasting shirt, another being pitch black and almost playing tricks on my eyes as I glances over it, and I could swear the one in the "number one" shirt was looking at me like a serial killer.

"To be honest, Cherry, I had no idea these were even here. I just found them when you did. I'm not sure whether we should keep them, though. . ." I trailed off.

Cherry turned towards me, locking eyes with mine in a pleading expression. Her arms clutched tightly around the toy she picked up as she spoke, sinking into what looked like some extremely comfortable plush.

"Oh, please, Dad!" Cherry said. "It can't hurt any!"

Darn, how could I say no to a face like that? At any rate, it's not like we'd bought many toys before we had a place of our own, and letting her play with these could only save money while we temporarily focused on more urgent things. Like that pipe downstairs that I'm pretty sure was leaking, pretty sure I needed to fix that first.

"Oh, alright. Just promise me you won't put them anywhere they'll get stepped on, OK? It'd suck if I was walking down the stairs carrying a ladder and tripped over Mr. . .whatever that is you're holding." I said.

She hugged the weird toy bunny again, this time more happily. I could feel my heart melting a bit as she smiled. I was so lost on this whole parenting thing, but every time she was happy just made it feel a little more worth it.

"Don't worry, I won't, Dad! I promise!" Cherry said, grinning. "You know what? I think this place is pretty neat after all. I hope you're right about it getting neater, because this place will be just amazing then!"

Cherry dashed off across the wooden floor out of the room and down the hallway towards her own bedroom after this, making what I could only assume were attempts at whatever noises she thought the little critter made. Heh, kids. It felt weird being called Dad sometimes, you know, but it felt good too. Some stepparents, they'd go years just trying to get their new kids to call them that. Cherry. . .she loved me right out the gate. And well, I loved her too. The fact that her first father didn't care enough about her to even ask about her after he left. . .it boggled my mind sometimes. I could never leave anyone close to me like that, let alone my own kid. Let alone a kid as precious and innocent as this.

Ah, but that's me trailing off in my thoughts. I still needed to figure out what to do with this room.

I glanced around at the slightly cracked paint on the walls. That would definitely need a fresh coat, yep. The flooring was scuffed but mostly good, maybe some polish there. The window needed curtains, obviously, maybe some blinds too? With a little work, this could be a pretty good spare bedroom. Or maybe. . .oh gosh, what there were more little Cherries running around the house soon?! I hadn't even thought that hard about more kids. But then, regardless of if this is a guest room or a nursery, the shelves in here would likely need to at least be moved. . .

I looked at the collection of plush toys again. These had to at least have names, right? Or was this just someone's weird sewing project? I glanced down each row, trying to check for tags. There didn't seem to be any so far. Notes then, maybe? Some kind of label. . .

I glanced up and down each row again. They all seemed super high quality, far more so than I'd expect from a store or from anything home sewn. The weirdness stuck out even more the more I looked, the toys seeming almost random in design. The first to immediately come to notice from the top were the various moustached men in overalls, but there was everything from a guy in a Robin Hood outfit to what looked like someone in a suit of space armor. And that wasn't even getting into the weird animals. Some of them weren't even animals, for that matter, just rounded. . .rounded things, I guess.

There didn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to how they were organized at all. Or maybe there was a little bit, I just wasn't getting it. I glanced under each one to check and see if maybe the names were written underneath, or label cards, or. . .I don't know. I guess it was too much to ask that these things have any kind of preassigned names. But I wasn't giving up yet, maybe if I just-

My eyes locked onto a piece of paper sitting under one of them, a doll of someone in a slightly creepy black and purple hooded coat. Huh. I guess I just wasn't looking hard enough. But I didn't notice a note under any of the others? It looked a bit small for a master list, maybe someone's personal note was left here by accident?

I lifted the doll up gingerly, feeling oddly awkward picking it up. I slipped the paper out from under it, setting the doll back down carefully where I had found it. Hopefully I wasn't accidentally pulling out someone's diary page or something. . .but I guess there's no one here to worry about that with. Carefully I flipped the paper over, noticing a few paragraphs scrawled onto the little page. . .

Greetings,

My name is Robin Lowell, tactician of the Shepherds and wife of Chrom Lowell, Exalt of the Halidom of Ylisse. If you are reading this, then. . .gods, perhaps there's some hope after all.

This is difficult to explain, but. . .I'm sure you noticed the dolls? You can't not have, this was placed under one of them after all. That doll. . .that was me. We've been. . .the whole place has been placed under a curse. We're all trapped as these things, all of us. We can't eat, we can't breathe. . .soon we'll be unable to move. I write this while I'm still able. But if someone is reading this, then chances are the curse has begun to fade.

If the curse was not immediate to take hold, it's likely it will not fade immediately either. I don't know if it will happen over days or hours, but the process will most likely be rather unsettling at best. If I wish to not have a broom taken to my head, I'd best warn anyone who finds this of that. But don't tell the others I wrote this, some may have preferred to handle the situation with subtletly. As a strategist, I see no plan where we shall go unnoticed for long. There's simply too much desperation to move bottled up even now.

Know that whatever happens, the Shepherds stand to protect the innocent, wherever they may find them. If what happens here takes a turn for the dangerous, feel free to call upon me at any time. To offer the finest army on the continent to your aid would be a hollow promise as I lay here with strange woolly innards eternally forcing themselves up my throat, but should I find myself in the flesh once again I will happily bring any aid one might need. That isn't to say there's none here I recognize, of course, but Lucina prefers to appear and disappear of her own will. Still, were she to find you in danger she'd happily rescue you, though she isolates herself she still bears a sense of compassion beyond what she'll admit of herself. Something she has closer in common with the ancient Hero-King she adores so deeply than she dares to hope.

. . .The strangeness of this place can be it's own curse at times. She was forced to watch that very Hero-King, cast from some distant Outrealm, sobbing disraught today as everyone suffered around him. Perhaps even sobbing a bit in fear himself. He's so young here, I hardly imagined. . .Ah, it's not important. Forget this paragraph exists.

That is what I offer to you. All I can ask is that you be brave and have mercy.

I stared at the paper incredulously. Someone clearly had a rather dark imagination when they wrote this. Still. . .I guess it gave one of them a name. Robin, I guess? And they mentioned something about a Lucina and a Hero-King. . .the latter's not much of a name though, right?

I looked at the doll again. It still seemed kinda needlessly creepy with the hood up like that. Maybe if I flipped the hood down it'd look a little nicer? Luckily it wasn't sewn on, and the hood flipped down pretty easy. To my surprise, the head underneath had snow white hair. The hazel eyes were a bit more normal, but. . .they almost seemed to have a pained expression sewn on. It was kind of creepy itself. . .actually, probably more creepy than the hood was, back up it goes.

The look had already burned itself into my head, though, and I was having a hard time shaking it out. Just seeing a toy wince so genuinely like that. . .it was almost enough to make me think, just for a second, that the note I'd found was something more than a prank. But no, that's just wild fantasy. Something a kid would think, really. The note was probably written in response to the way they were sewn rather than the other way around. The writer noticed how it looked kinda like they must have been suffering and made a little story for it. That's why none of the others have papers, because for all their weirdness they still look pretty happy or neutral.

I looked at the toy again, trying to brush aside the vague feeling that still lingered. It probably didn't have a real name at all. But for some reason I still felt like I needed to call it Robin in my head.

"You know, thinking about this almost kind of makes me wish you could hear me. With that look I feel like someone has to tell you everything is going to be OK." I said to no one in particular. "Wait, no, I take it back, a doll that could hear people would actually be really creepy. Still though. . .I kinda wish you'd been sewn with a happier expression. It's gotta suck to be miserable like that all the time."

I glanced back up from looking at the doll, realizing I'd just spent several minutes contemplating an inanimate object. Cherry still needed me to put her bed in her new room, it's not like I could have her sleep on the floor. I'd need to go over there soon. I looked over at the sea of plush toys one more time. . .and noticed one of them had fallen to the floor.

I walked up to it a bit more nervously than I figured I had any right to. I'd thought all of these were placed pretty firmly on the shelf, but I guess not this one. I grabbed it lightly off of the floor and took a look at it for a moment. This one must be an angel, I guess? But it's wings and clothes were all dark and sinister. There was a much happier angel already sitting on the shelf, looking up, although they were clearly sewn from the same pattern. This one seemed almost. . .angry, though? Huh, I guess less of these had happy expressions than I thought. The red eyes chosen for this one were almost kind of scary, even if the expression sewn on looked more like a boyish scowl. I placed it back into the empty spot on the shelf as delicately as I could, then looked again at where it sat. Sure enough, it didn't make sense how it had fallen, it was perfectly snug in there. But there wasn't really any logical explanation for how it could have, either, so it honestly probably wasn't important.

I found myself still locking eyes with the collection as I walked out the door, something feeling really weird about it all even if nothing more had happened than a prank and some human error. I guess my imagination must have been running a bit too wild. Maybe Cherry's brushing off on me. I had to tear myself away from looking for some odd reason or another, leaving the door hanging open as I left. It's not like we had pets, though, so it's not like there'd be anything that could get in there. I made a mental note to close it later so I wouldn't start letting my thoughts run every time I walked past, though. I'd already agreed to let Cherry have them and it'd be wrong to take that away over my feeling weird, but something about being in there still bothered me.

I guess I just don't do well with dolls. Eh.