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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Quirkydave1777 on 2026-08-15 12:44:26+00:00.

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I’m posting this looking for help. It took a while for a major sushi chain to come to our town. I’m not going to name the chain as I don’t want legal trouble. I don’t want them to find us. But you know the one. You grab from the conveyer or order from the tablet screen at each table. If you put five plates into the slot, you get a chance at winning a prize, a little bottle cap or plastic toy, but no one ever wins.

Yeah, it takes things a little while to come out to the boonies.

Anyway, I want to know if anyone has ever had this happen to them.

It started with my brother Blake’s wedding. Keep in mind I’m changing the names here to protect the parties involved. Again, I don’t want them to find us. This isn’t a legal complaint. A bunch of us were back home for summer, that is my friends and I from college. Blake didn’t have many friends in town, so my buddies and I took him out to the new sushi chain, since it had just opened. It was me, Blake, Jimmy and Tom.

I know, right? Who just does a sushi night for a bachelor party? But Blake was always a quiet guy so we thought it was his speed. Plus it’s not like we had many options.

The sushi selected from the tablet all slid in along the top conveyer and arrived with the little ping, ping, ping that announces your order has reached you. There were a few other people in the restaurant, but it wasn’t too crowded. Why am I telling you this? Because I want you to know there weren’t too many people’s orders to mistake.

So first this little pink nigiri sushi (I’ve looked it up and that means “rice ball,” with the fish and stuff on top) rolled in, stopping by our table. No ping. Then it went away, sliding backward in the direction it came from. Okay, so we figured, “Wrong order.”

We chowed down a little more and then it came back again. It was bright neon pink, with lots of little speckles on it, like maybe it was ground fish or not meat at all, but made up of those little eggs.

“Did you order that?” I asked.

Blake shook his head.

“Did you?” Tom asked.

“I didn’t,” Jimmy said.

None of us had ordered it.

It slid away again. We just figured, “Weird.”

A few more salmon nigiri later and...

Look, I mean they had only just opened, so we figured it was an early system bug. But that same speckly pink sushi came back.

“Okay, what the fuck?” Jimmy said, like he was actually getting kind of mad.

I looked up at the plate.

You know how they have different plates for each price? I mean, the ones on the bottom conveyer are all a standard $2, but you can go up to $5 ordering from the tablet menu, indicated by the color of the plate.

This plate had something written on it. The ring around the plate was light blue, and it had thick white letters running across it.

It said: “THIS IS NOT FOR YOU.”

I turned back to the table and let them know.

“What the fucking hell?” Jimmy said.

I shrugged.

Jimmy’s the daredevil in our group, so he looked at us and said, “Do you dare me to eat it?”

No one dared him. Blake mumbled something about how it wasn’t good to eat other people’s sushi, and even then, it was weird to have a plate say that.

Tom was saying that it was probably a reserved piece, like for a birthday table, and kept getting sent to us by mistake.

I wondered why it didn’t ping though, and why it would keep coming back from the kitchen to us in that case. I started to say we should call over staff, but before I could, Jimmy had pulled the plate off the conveyor and picked up the first piece with his chopsticks.

He chomped down, saying this had better be free.

A second later, he started coughing so hard I dropped my chopsticks and had to quickly pick them up off the table.

Tom handed Jimmy a cup of water. He asked how the weird sushi tasted.

“Like stale backwash,” Jimmy said. I wasn’t sure what he meant but apparently this shit was fucking nasty.

We said don’t eat the rest of it then, but Jimmy said “Fuck no, it’s ours,” and also asked if we dared him to eat the second piece. Once again, no one dared him, but Jimmy put the whole thing in his mouth and ate it anyway and then looked at us like he was so fucking tough, but I noticed him chugging down a lot of water afterward.

We put the plate down the slot and it didn’t add to our total, so I guess we didn’t end up paying for it, which was good. Especially considering what happened afterward.

In the end, we didn’t win any prizes.

The next day we were supposed to meet up for a movie. Blake was busy with his wedding prep. Tom and I met at a mall but Jimmy wasn’t there. We kept texting and calling but there was no answer.

We went and saw the movie, thinking he must have slept in.

When we got out and checked our phones we saw we had a message in our group chat.

“Seriously not good,” and a bunch of barfing emojis.

Then he sent us a picture and it was seriously the most nasty thing I have ever seen.

It was of Jimmy’s toilet bowl and he had obviously just hurled in it, and the water was pink. I mean like neon pink.

I messaged back to ask if he had just downed a bunch of Pepto Bismol or something, and also, man, what the hell, but he messaged back, “No, man. Nothing,” and then, “It’s that sushi place, I swear. Probably that nasty free fish I ate.”

Tom and I looked at each other. We wanted to suggest he go to the hospital but… This is America and Jimmy’s family is not super well to do on the health insurance front, so he wasn’t going to the hospital unless he was dying.

“Go get a free meal for me,” he said.

Tom said hey, they might actually let us do that, so maybe we should stop by. Small town. We didn’t have much else to do.

So we piled in my family’s car and drove out past my town’s creek to where the sushi chain is. Again, you know the one.

Tom and I got out.

Despite having just recently opened, like the other day, it was almost empty inside.

We went up to the counter and rang the buzzer. It took the only front staff, some old guy who looked like he was 104, what felt like five minutes to arrive. Where did they find this guy? I wondered. He didn’t even look Japanese.

“Can I help you?” Grandpa asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Actually, our friend ate here yesterday and he’s practically puking his guts out. Think that gets us a free meal?”

“That isn’t the policy here,” the old man said.

Tom asked if we could speak to the manager, but apparently this old man was the manager.

“Okay, well,” I said. I didn’t want to have to bust out the secret weapon, but desperate times called for desperate measures. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone, blew up Jimmy’s nasty toilet picture real big and held it up to the old man. “My man is vomiting pink and that doesn’t change your mind?”

The old man’s face went pale. I mean like when they say that, they don’t really mean it, usually, but we literally watched this man seep melanin.

“What did he order?” the old man asked. “What did he eat?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We got some weird plate that kept coming by our table that said ‘THIS IS NOT FOR YOU.’ He ate that.”

The old man got even whiter.

“He ate from the plate?” he said.

I looked at Tom. “Well, yeah,” I answered.

Suddenly the old man leaned over the counter and slammed both his hands down on top of it. Then he started screaming at the top of his lungs. I mean shouting full force.

“It wasn’t for you!” He was leaning further over the counter now. The few other customers were looking our way. “It wasn’t for you!!!”

He was screaming louder and louder, so we slowly backed away and went out into the parking lot. When we looked back from next to my car, he was still standing there, in front of the glass doors. We couldn’t hear him anymore, but it looked like he was still shouting, looking us dead in the eyes.

That shook us pretty bad, but we weren’t prepared for what happened next.

As we prepared to get in the car, we both got messages from Jimmy’s mom.

At least the message said they were from her. They still came from Jimmy’s phone.

“Is Jimmy with you?” she was asking. “He was home sick and now he’s gone.”

Apparently his bedroom window was open and she hadn’t heard him leave. His bedroom door was still shut. He was running a high fever, so she was worried something was wrong if we didn’t know where he was.

We said we weren’t sure, but we’d look. At this point Tom and I were getting pretty spooked.

We drove back from the sushi restaurant, past the creek, and as we did Tom ordered me to stop the car. I mean he practically shouted his head off, and I almost drove us off the road. Luckily it was an empty street because we live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, can’t even get sushi restaurants when the rest of the country gets them, but come on.

He was pointing toward the creek and screaming his head off. “Stop the car, stop the car, pull over.”

I stopped the car in the shoulder lane and Tom ran out, still pointing. I put on my hazard lights and followed.

There in the water was something shimmering, glistening. It took me a minute to comprehend what I was seeing. I thought it was just the water catching the sun. It was glinting silver and then I realized that the thing Tom had been pointing at and shouting about was a fish, or a man. It was a small, man-sized thing crouching right there in the water looking over its shoulder with big bulging glistening eyes and silver scales and I’ve never seen anything so fucked up in my life. We have our local legends, but nothing like this.

It was w...

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