Try before You Buy by Kris P. Kreme
On the night before Halloween, Kassidy regrets taking such a frustrating seasonal job. As a responsible high school senior she wants to earn as much as she can all year in preparation for college but cleaning up constant messes only for new messes to be made is mind numbing.
When a customer comes running in late at night, desperately needing a costume to avoid being caught after stealing some top secret Brain Drain and Trance-tory tech will Kassidy have more than her mind numbed as she becomes a costume for him to wear?
A chaos like this can only come from S.M.U.T. and after being worn like a costume, will Kassidy have all new ambitions of her own this Halloween?
Kassidy never thought about the specifics of her seasonal job when she took it, certainly not the mess she would be facing working Monday, October 30th at a Halloween discount store that only opened once a year. But a customer this year may have more urgent needs than any product can provide and Kassidy may find herself becoming just the product he needs with lasting effects for her entire future to follow.
A brand new CoverSwap Shorty returns, complete with Halloween hijinks and unexpected twists and turns as readers this Halloween will get not one, not two, not even three, but four crossover genres in one twisted tale. Straight from the original story Blanking Out, the cover begins the story of Kassidy, a responsible local senior in high school working a seasonal job to build up more funds before graduation and college next year.
Kassidy has never really enjoyed the job, only a month long ordeal of constantly cleaning up the mess customers leave when pulling all things Halloween off the shelves in a cluttered small little store.
She’d like to blame fellow high schoolers Zack and Paulie who didn’t even bother to show up on the first day of her last week of the job. But the truth is, the job isn’t anything anyone really takes all that seriously. Even their boss heath doesn’t let much get to him, bothered by them not showing up but always maintaining a frustratingly chipper upbeat tone. Still, thanks to their absence, and the store’s policy boldly proclaimed on hanging signs, Kassidy will have to clean up messes on every aisle where customers all too willingly tried before they bought.
In reality, most don’t actually buy, as evident by the mess on every aisle, the hazardous tripping mess in the floor. They try, but they don’t buy… at least that is until a somewhat frantic looking man in a hoodie comes running into the small Halloween store, carrying an oddly modern silver case.
Figuring the man is merely another shopper looking to complete some science fiction based costume, Kassidy sticks with her cleaning up the aisles, a thankless task that will surely take her the entire rest of the night. But the man seems less interested in what the store holds than rather what the store doors might hold out, seeming paranoid and bothered as he constantly keeps an eye out as though being chased.
On a nearby aisle cleaning, Kassidy overhears the man speaking on his phone, panicked and clearly stressed about something. He seems to be addressing someone on the line by the name of Rat, and talking about private security following him from a facility where he got two pieces of equipment, a Brain Drain payment processor, and a Trance-tory augmenting alternator.
It’s mostly gibberish to Kassidy, and she doesn’t take much of it seriously until the man catches her attention, asking if the costumes on a nearby aisle are the only ones they have left.
On the night before Halloween it isn’t exactly surprising that the best of everything has been picked through and snatched up, but the man, introducing himself as Dane Dalton seems fairly desperate for a disguise, not the cheap plastic masks left strewn about.
When Dane Dalton seems to think, look around, and then study Kassidy, offering to pay her if she can help him make just the costume he needs, she naturally assumes he just needs a hand with some of whatever stock the store has… and if he’s paying her extra, that’s just more money in the bank for her college prepping.
But soon after he has her press her thumb to a modern device he removes from one half of the metal case he carries, Kassidy is regretting her willingness to help. She’s slowly but surely going numb and stiff, unable to move, standing there blankly as Dane Dalton explains the situation.
He has stolen two very important pieces of technology for a group calling themselves S.M.U.T. and these pieces of technology will make for quite the extreme chaos on Halloween. But before he meets up with his contact Rat, to deliver the goods, he needs to throw off private security from the facility he stole them from. For that, he needs more than a costume… Dane needs an entirely new look, so different no one would imagine who he really is underneath.
Having pressed the payment processor, Kassidy’s entire body is being offered as payment, and when Dane uses a Trance-tory device in combination with that Brain Drain tech, he claims he can turn Kassidy INTO the very costume he needs.
But is it really possible to turn a girl into a costume, for a grown man to step right into her and wear her like a suit? Will Kassidy be more than just filled but corrupted by the process of becoming this man’s costume? Will Rat see all new promise in the way she looks when Dane wears her? And will all of this inspire new ideas for how Kassidy can avoid seasonal jobs and still earn plenty of money for college?
Find out in the twisted tale that takes a handful of genres, different story universes, and crumples them all into a ball that fits nicely within the Coverswap Shorty that is Try before you Buy.
Coming next… Time to get Bombed
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