It was just after dawn on the twentieth day, when Karl tore out his own throat and continued to rant and rave, that Lars' nerve finally broke.
Whatever evils nature hid in the woods, they could not match what he had seen and heard in the past weeks on the battlefield. Soldiers screaming as they were torn apart by invisible hands. The howling of men blown in half by an artillery volley, howling that never ceased. He had to get out. He would run all the way back to Bavaria, if necessary. Just away.
Lars scrambled to gather a few supplies in a rucksack before he left. Tins of food. Compass. Knife. The men in the trench, their bodies and minds in varying degrees of mutation, paid him no mind. Lars glanced at a rifle leaning against the trench wall. Memories of Russian soldiers screaming, faces consumed with fast-growing tumors, ran through his mind. He shuddered and moved on.
By the time he was ready, the first light was beginning to creep over the tops of the trees. Lars tried not to speculate why the sunlight was a deep emerald color. He nodded and sped away from the rear lines. No one noticed as he he dashed across the scarred mud and twisted trees of the battlefield. He didn't stop sprinting even when he encountered the beginnings of the woods.
A part of Lars' mind told him that he would need to conserve his strength, that running was a bad idea. He ignored it. Even a few hundred meters away from the battle, the trees became less crooked and twisted. Running from that damned place felt like the only thing to do. He could walk later. For the first time in several months, Lars smiled.
After several minutes of running, Lars stopped to catch his breath in a clearing. Suddenly, he heard a humming sound from behind him. It was a sound that he knew all too well; the accursed rifles of the Austrian scientist warming up.
"Turn around, please. Slowly," said a voice behind him, in a thick Hungarian accent. Lars did as the voice commanded, and found himself facing a wounded man sitting on top of a long wooden box with rope handles at each end. The man's eyes were of differing colors - one blue and one grey - and he had stitches over a wound running from his left ear to his chin. Lars recognized him as Nemeş, the scientist who had insisted that they use the demon weapons.
Despite the wound and the dirt, Nemeş' hair and mustache were immaculately neat. He wore the blue uniform of an Austro-Hungarian officer. Several large spikes of bone - from the Russians' rifles, no doubt - had torn through the uniform on his right shoulder and arm.
In his left, Nemeş held a rifle, aimed squarely at Lars' chest. He looked Lars up and down.
"Deserting is a capital crime, you know. I would be well within my rights to shoot you here and now. It would be befitting a coward of your stature," Nemeş said. Lars felt his mouth go dry. Once upon a time, he had considered death by poison gas or a shell to be the worst thing in the world. The past weeks had taught him otherwise. He thought about dying here in the woods, his body distorted beyond all recognition and felt his legs nearly give out.
Nemeş motioned to a shovel propped on a tree at the edge of the clearing. "Take the shovel," he said, "And dig a grave. Don't stop unless I say otherwise."
Lars's throat tightened. He opened his mouth to protest. Please, I was doing reconnaissance. Please, I was running messages to a secret detachment. Please, I have a wife and child back home. The doctor's eyes narrowed and his finger slipped beneath the trigger guard of the rifle.
"Take the shovel. And dig until I say otherwise," he said,"Unless you would rather I shoot you in the jaw first. I have heard that it is extremely painful."
Lars nodded and took the shovel. He began to dig in the middle of the clearing. So this is how he would die: In a forest, forced to dig his own grave.
It had been two days since he had slept, and the exhaustion, combined with the labor of digging, helped to remove him from the situation. He didn't feel any fear, just a dull resignation to the objective facts.
When the top of the hole reached above his head, Lars stopped digging. His shirt was soaked through with sweat, and his arms ached.
"Keep going," came the voice from above. It sounded more ragged than before. Lars sighed and continued to dig.
At three meters, it became almost impossible for Lars to throw the dirt out of the hole. "Stop!" the voice barked. Lars was happy to obey.
Nemeş' head peeked over the edge of of the hole. Lars could see the tip of the rifle beside the man. This was it, he thought, dead in a forest. He felt like crying, but couldn't summon the energy to do so. Instead, he just looked at the ground.
Suddenly, Nemeş' hand came into his field of vision. Lars looked and saw that the doctor was extending a hand down to him.
"Take," he said. Lars grabbed the shovel and took the doctor's hand. Suddenly, he found himself being pulled out of the hole and placed on level ground. Lars stared at the doctor for a moment, panting. Who the hell was this man, who had lifted him out of the grave with just one arm, as if Lars had weighed as much as a kitten?
Nemeş reached into a pocket and pulled out a silver flask. He pushed it in Lars' general direction.
"Drink," Nemeş said. It was only then that Lars realized how thirsty he had been. He opened the flask and took a swig, nearly choked on the burning liquid. The doctor stood silently, waiting for Lars to finish. After his coughing subsided, Lars took another drink. After all this, he could use a drink.
Nemeş pointed to the box he had been sitting on, then to the hole.
"Take," he said. His voice was low and raspy. Lars realized the truth of the situation, and felt relief flow through him. He was just helping a burial, not arranging his own. The relief shooed away any inconvenient questions that lingered behind.
He went to the box, followed by Nemeş. Lars took one end, while the doctor took the other, using his good arm.
When they were a meter away from the hole, a loud thump came from the coffin. Lars dropped his end of the casket. There was another thump, then the muffled sound of panicked screaming that Lars recognized as Polish. The coffin lid opened a crack, and he saw a few fingers probing desperately at the air.
Nemeş slammed his hand down on the lid, eliciting a scream from the box and causing the fingers to quickly draw back in.
"Take!" he commanded again. His eyes narrowed. Lars felt he might be sick, and regretted downing an entire flask in a single sitting. He looked at the ground, and noticed that the rifle was by the officer's feet. He bent down and picked up his end of the coffin. Together, they carried it to the edge of the hole.
"Drop!" Nemeş said. Lars obeyed, and the coffin landed with a loud thud. The voice inside began screaming again. The doctor jumped into the hole and opened the lid, setting one foot into the coffin.
"Bury!" he said. His voice sounded like stones grinding against one another now.
Lars nodded. Nemeş opened the lid, and for a half second, Lars could see the occupant of the box. He wore the uniform of a Russian soldier, and his hands were bound together. The skin on the left side of his face, from ear to chin, was gone, revealing a scabbed-over mess. The man in the box stared up at Lars, his remaining blue eye wide with fear. The doctor laid down and slammed the lid shut behind him with a force that caused the sides of the grave to shudder. A screaming came from the coffin once more, but was quickly cut off.
Lars stared at the grave for a moment. Then, taking the shovel, he began to fill in the hole as quickly as possible. There was not enough soil that he could put between himself and that officer.
Within a few minutes, the work was done. Lars was exhausted, and felt his insides burning. But, more than ever, he needed to leave. He sat for a few moments to catch his breath before grabbing his pack and leaving the clearing.
Again, he began to run, just to get as much ground as possible between himself and the box. After a few seconds of running, he doubled over. His insides were burning.
He felt the heat, hotter than any furnace, fill him. The pain made it impossible for him to scream, so he gurgled in agony. He fell on the ground and tried desperately to get the burning out of him, tearing at his stomach to get something, anything, out of him.
For a split second, his thoughts turned to the flask Nemeş had offered him. What the hell had been in it? That evil, con-
Then there was only fire.

Three meters underground, Feliks heard the explosion from Lars' body. An intense heat washed over him, and the ground quaked for several seconds. He cried out, and was about to pound on the lid of the coffin, when he heard a low bark coming from beside him.
Feliks whimpered as the thing that had once been Dr. Mátyás Nemeş growled beside him.


SCP-507 heads on a wild adventure through wacky parallel universes, and may just learn his own shocking origins!

He wakes up in a bed that's his. No one else is there. The house is his; it has his pictures in it. He drives his car to work. He knows all of the people at work, and does the job he knows. People talk to him. He drives his car back home and watches TV he knows. Eventually he goes to bed.

He wakes up in a bed that's his. A woman, his wife or girlfriend, is there. The house is theirs; it has their pictures in it. He drives his van to work. He knows most of the people at work, and does the job he did three years ago. People talk to him. He drives his van back home and watches TV he recognizes. Eventually he goes to bed. He doesn't talk to his wife; he doesn't know her.

He wakes up on a floor that used to he his. There is no bed, or any other furniture. No one else is there. The house used to be his; it has imprints of pictures in it. He walks to work. His car is at his current house. He knows the people at work, but there aren't very many of them. He does a job he doesn't know. People ignore him. He walks to the store, then back to his old house. He rolls out a sleeping bag he bought on the floor to go to sleep.

He wakes up in his sleeping bag, on the floor, in someone else's house. Someone is upstairs. It's like his house, except there are other peoples' pictures on the walls. He takes his sleeping bag and grabs their keys. He walks to work, because he doesn't have a zeppelin license. He leaves their keys in the zeppelin door. He knows one person at work, and does a job he didn't know existed. People are frightened of him. He's taken out of the building by police. He requests his sleeping bag, but goes to sleep sitting on the jail cell bench.

He wakes up on the ground, in mud. No one else is there. It's like a forest, but the branches are bright green. He walks to find somebody, and finds out that the sky is tan-colored. He thinks he hears a noise in the trees. He doesn't recognize anything, and nobody is around. Occasionally he feels frightened. There's certainly things in the trees. He goes to sleep, fearing what's in the trees.

He wakes up on the floor, in a cell that's his. Eventually somebody comes by with breakfast. The cell is the Foundation's. He says he went a few places, and would like to document them. He walks to his researcher's office and fills out forms he knows. He talks to his researcher, and is told he'll need some tests. He takes more tests he knows. One of those last places gave him syphilis. He wanders the Site, and peeks in on some people he knows. He eventually goes back to his cell.


Creation was made of fire and song, and from the glowing clouds of the beginning came the Stars. They were the firstborn of matter, the sustainers of all Creation. In their bright-burning forges the heavier elements were formed, and the music of the spheres was carried upon their mighty thoughts. They measured the boundaries of the cosmos and set forth the orders of the celestial geometries by their song, and the Clusters of the Main Sequence were in harmony.
In those days, a young Star of the cluster Errant-G descended upon the molten firmament of Yesod. Sauelsuesor was the Star's name, and being young for her kind, she was curious as to the nature of the lower places of creation, and wondered at those regions which hung below the heavens and basked in the light of the Stars.
With her soul wreathed in hydrogen, Sauelsuesor passed over the molten wastes and seas of fire, searching for the fulfillment of her curiosity. What to make of this slowed realm of cooled matter? It did not sing of the Harmony of the Spheres, but merely moved along its arcs like dust disturbed by a breath. She could find no minds that inhabited it, and wondered if it was best to follow the example of the older Stars, and sing without regard for this lower plane.
Just as she thought to return to her burning cradle, Sauelsuesor happened upon Anghammarad the giant, he who would be called “King of the Buried Ones”. He stood in a lake of fire, piling up stones like mountains to form his forge and anvil. His sons and daughters too were there, building forges of their own more fit to their size.
“What brings you here, little Star?” asked Anghammarad, on whose brow was set a crown of gold and bronze.
“I came to explore the firmament, and to see what minds might inhabit it. You alone, O King, I have found.”
“You burn brightly and with impatience, little Star,” said the king. “The world is young and unformed upon my anvil.” The giant took up a great mass of molten metal from the lake and set it upon his striking-block. In his great, blackened hand he took up his hammer and tongs.
“Were that this world were finished, I would think you disappointed in its spoils,” said Anghammarad. “They shall not be as us or our kin. You may well share the Music of the Spheres with them, but the minds of matter shall be easily clouded and oft forget.”
“Why should they be cut off from Stars so? Should they not share in our music?”
Anghammarad raised his mighty hammer, and lightning struck at its pitted head. It fell and rang DOOM across the firmament, and the clouds of smoke were parted.
“We sustain,” spoke the king of giants as he raised his hammer again. “You and your kind the heavens, myself and mine the firmament.” DOOM. “And sustain we shall. Do not worry over the fleeting things to pass in our shadows, when the shaping is done.” DOOM “They shall make well on their own.”
DOOM
“Why then, O King, must we be so distant?”
DOOM
“As the Elders are distant from us, little Star, we too shall be distant from those who follow upon the firmament. What kinship might be shared between us?” DOOM “They shall be as the sparks upon my anvil.” DOOM “It is not your place to be of aid to them.” DOOM “They shall have their gods. They shall look up and see all your kin of the Main Sequence and walk among the shadows of my children, and will marvel at the wonders just out of their reach.” DOOM “And that is sufficient, for sparks.”
Sauelsuesor pondered this, as the charred king struck his hammer down. DOOM. DOOM. DOOM.
“What do you build here, king?” asked Sauelsuesor.
“I build the foundation of creation, O Star. Yesod the Many-Faced.” Anghammarad now set aside hammer and tongs and shaped the soft metal with his hands. He shaped it into a shape of twenty sides, and upon each point was a bead like water. Within the shape there was a hollowness that did shift and sway.
Anghammarad swirled the smoke about him, and drew out with his fingers shimmering Ways. He wove these to the metal shape, to its facets and beads, stringing them together in tapestry. The Ways formed a labyrinth that fell across Yesod, burrowing into its matter, and faded from sight.
“There shall be facets, to make a strong foundation. Creation cannot stand upon singularity, as with the kingships of Malkuth.” Anghammarad wiped his hands upon the rag at his belt. “Here, there might be Ways between faces.”
“It is beautiful indeed, O King,” spoke Sauelsuesor. “But I do wish to offer some aid, so as not to have spent my journey in vain.”
“You need not do any more than sing the song eternal, little Star. Sustain the heavens, and I shall sustain what lies beneath. This alone is what is needed.”
To this, the young Star could offer no argument.
Sauelsuesor left Anghammarad then. Her spirit returned to her fiery body and she resumed her song, though she did occasionally turn her gaze back towards the firmament, longing for something she could not name.
Anghammarad worked further at his forge, laying forth the facets of Yesod and setting down the Taproots. When this was completed, and the Labyrinth was set solid and strong upon the faces of Yesod, Anghammarad and his children took up their residence deep within the cooling firmament. Buried deep below, they fell into a deep slumber, and their dreams mingled with the Music of the Spheres until all of Yesod was wreathed in the Dream-Time.
The Waking-Time began then, and the sustainers of the heavens and the earth did sing and slumber. It was then in later ages that the children of Yesod would wander in their shadows and wonder at what magnificent gods had passed before them.


The Commander sternly stared over his crew. They were a good crew, rich with protein. For a moment, he steeled his nerves. "Alright squad. This is it. Today, we infiltrate the hated Foundation's fortress of death, and take our hostage!"
The soldiers buzzed with anticipation. Many whipped their hair around, or took off into the air. The excitement in the air was palpable. It was a scene of total exhilaration.
"Today… the Queen's Navy breaks into Site-77!"
Crew members erupted into applause. "To the battlestations!" yelled the Commander. "The Queen's Navy shall not be denied! Our enemies will be vanquished! Our allies liberated! This is our turning point!"
Still cheering, they flew like the wind to their positions. The Commander sat himself in the command module, looking out his windows to the world. "Now… we use stealth. Infiltration tactics. Like only we can do."

Security Officer Macintosh was manning the security compound component of Site-77's entrance chamberlock. She probably wouldn't have even looked up for more than the second it took to visually confirm that it was Dr. Roget entering. But today, like many other days past, Dr. Roget was using somebody else's keycard. She buzzed the intercom, and peered through the tinted window as he repeatedly stuck the ID card into the identifier. "Dr. Roget, why do you have Researcher Davis' keycard?"
"I, uh…" 'Ralph' coughed, and shifted his weight. He was wearing a hat and dark glasses, with his collar pulled up to his cheeks. His voice was hoarse. "We were both at a real wild party last night, after my flight got in. I've got, like, the worst hangover ever. Do you think we could skip the biometrics? I just want to go to my desk and die."
"Where's your ID card?"
"Davis has it. He'll be along later, let him in too."
She sighed. "Alright Ralph. This is the last time, though. Your gram's been on our asses about this. Says we're enabling you, and it does pose a security risk. Obviously, not saying you're going to do anything, but you know how it is."
Ralph grinned at her. She couldn't see through the glass, but his teeth were a grocery bag brown. "I'll smooth things over with her, don't worry. She usually drops by my office for a chat in the afternoons, so I'll talk to her then. Sound good?"
The heavy blast doors answered for her, pulling open and allowed Roget to enter Site-77.
Macintosh went back to watching the cameras.

The Commander piloted the HMS Not-Roget into the bowels of Site-77.
Finding Roget's office wasn't the main difficulty, but moving there undetected was. It was nerve-wracking, having to exchange pleasantries with so many Foundation personnel. How could one man know so many people? It seemed like every other person had nosy questions about the trip Roget had taken, or how he was feeling and asking why his face looked like that. The Commander brushed them off. Just get to the office…
Finally, the vessel slipped behind the office door, and locked it. As the Commander ordered the Not-Roget to sit down at the desk, he grinned internally. Sooner or later, she would come. Then, the standoff could begin. Their comrades-in-arms illegitimately imprisoned in Site-58 would not have to wait for long. Soon, their liberation would be at hand.
As the Commander waited, he found himself amused by the contents of the office. Their intelligence had been dead wrong. They'd predicted a messy environment, perfect for laying lots of scouts in waiting. Instead, it was incredibly neat and tidy. The plants had plastic covering them, and the desk was positively sparkling.
The Commander ordered the deployment of the scouts. That was when the gas began to seep in. Instantly, the alarm was raised. Retreat! Flee! The operation was compromised! The Foundation knew? Oh, god, how did they know?
The HMS Not-Roget managed to get to the door, but collapsed with one hand on the knob. Before long, it was all over. The Commander went down with his ship.

INCIDENT REPORT 2324-77-A
PRINCIPALS INVOLVED: SCP-2324 Doctor Ralph Roget, Security Officer Angela Macintosh, Director Shirley Gillespie, Junior Researcher Donald Davis (DECEASED)
INCIDENT DETAILS: On ██/██/████, an instance of SCP-2324-A was able to infiltrate Site-77 by impersonating Dr. Roget, who was due to return from a vacation to Toronto that day or the next. The host vessel was Junior Researcher Donald Davis, who is believed to have been infected by unknown means within 24 hours of the incident. Gross lapses in security protocols by Officer Macintosh allowed this Keter-Class entity to reach the administrative offices. Further tragedy was averted when a scheduled fumigation in Dr. Roget's office terminated all instances of SCP-2324.
Director Gillespie is believed to have been the target of this infiltration. The Director has ordered a full overhaul of security protocols, and a complete replacement of security personnel within Site-77, to be implemented by Security Chief Anderson. Doctor Andy Toxie, Foundation toxicologist, has been commended and recommended for a Foundation Star by Director Gillespie for the potency of his fumigation, which saved countless lives.


by qntm

"El, it's finished."
Lyn Marness is more than ninety years old and hasn't stood at his full height in ten. He was a tower of a man in his prime, two metres tall and built like a boxer. Nearly nobody he ever met was able to look him straight in the eye, at least not and tell him "No". Illness has gradually eaten away at that over the years. He feels as if he lives at the bottom of a deep bath, everybody he ever meets looking down at him from slippery, unscalable walls, none of them able to reach down to help him. He's spent his final months crumpled up in bed like a dying spider, changing to a corpse's colour ahead of time. It might have been bearable if he'd lost his mind, but he remembers what he used to be: a leader, a powerhouse. He used to be able to alter the course of terrible events for the better, to get justice. He used to protect people.
"El. You can wake up now."
But there's a warm wind through his thin colourless hair and there's direct sunlight coming down on him now, and the heat is filling him up like a tonic. He's outside; it's been too long since he was last outside. When he opens his eyes he sees his lake, the one in the Northwest which he used to have all to himself every summer. He's on a boat, his boat, lying on a blanket laid on the deck. A few kilometres away behind them is the little lake house, empty.
It's perfect. He didn't know he had the strength left to safely leave the hospital, let alone travel this far. But if he'd put his mind to it and selected a final moment, this might have been it.
"Do you remember me?"
Marness looks, with eyes which are strengthening. The woman speaking is seated on the deck beside him, attentive. She has a large plastic box full of medical supplies open in front of her, and a light suit jacket laid on the deck beside it, and she has her sleeves rolled up so she can work. As he watches, she carefully disposes of a needle.
A dim memory surfaces and starts taking shape. The woman is twice as old now as when he knew her last, and visibly twice as confident. It would be difficult to forget her. He taught her everything he— well, everything he could remember at the time. He remembers her as a field agent. He remembers sending her through Hell, a fistful of times. "Marion."
"El," the woman softly explains, "you died. You died surrounded by grieving family. They loved you very much, and they cried over you. The funeral for the fake is in a few days, but unfortunately you won't be able to see it yourself. You're dead now, and this is what comes next."
"Marion. Hutchinson." Marness feels gold spreading through his bones, miracle juice.
It's Wheeler now, but she doesn't correct him. "When you retired from the Foundation, El, we did what we do to all of us who retire; what all of us agree to when we sign up. We gave you some medicine which made you forget. As you stepped out of the door for the last time, all the work you did for us — great work, which saved lives — evaporated away, and your cover story sealed over those years became reality. That's why you've spent your whole retirement believing that you were a former section chief at the FBI. It's what you wanted, it's what we wanted, it's what you agreed to.
"But you, alone, agreed to something else as well. And you must be starting to remember, now, what that something else was. I've injected you with a serum which throws the human aging process into hard reverse, and it affects everything: organs, tissues, memories. You'll be coming up on it soon. Remember?"
"Yes," Marness croaks, remembering, dizzy.
"You signed over your final twelve hours to us. You asked for a full and happy and well-deserved retirement… but now, for the last day, you work for us again, because of one particular job. I have it in writing here, you see? Do you recognise your signature, and mine? I witnessed."
"Yes."
"Do you remember who you are?"
"Doctor Lyn Patrick Marness, of the Foundation," he says. "Antimemetics Division founder."
Wheeler smiles with relief. It's good to see him again.
"We need some memories from you," she explains. "Memories which nobody else in the world has access to, and which are buried so deeply that we can't extract them without killing you. So this afternoon, that's what we're going to do. We're going to extract those memories, and once we're done, you'll be dead."
Marness has already begun to regress to the time when he himself set this wheel in motion. He remembers, very clearly, discovering the mystery in his own head, the blank spots which he couldn't explain, and couldn't safely access with any kind of chemical or physical technique. He remembers deferring the mystery until now.
"What happened in 1976?" Wheeler asks.

*

Marness sits up. His skin is beginning to clear and his breathing is improving.
He feels as if his brain is cleaved in two by a wormhole, such that his eyes are focusing on different time periods. In his right eye he sees the lake and the boat he's dying on; in his left he sees a collage of electrifyingly familiar past faces and places. Bart Hughes with his grin and thick glasses and baby face, looking like some kid dressed up as a Foundation researcher; the original Site 48 crew, great techs but a hopeless excuse for a softball team; young Marion with steel-strong nerves and a mind like a laser; suits and lab coats and MTF operatives. And everywhere paperwork, and floods of serial numbers.
He starts to speak.
1976 was the year he founded the division. He brainstormed the whole thing in one legendary week, hammering out the science and then distilling the first chemical mnestic with the help of a hand-picked trio of assistants, the first Antimemetics researchers. No antimemetic SCPs had even been observed up to that point — the entire operation was a shot in the dark — and yet the team immediately struck gold. Passive black holes of information, active predatory infovores, unrememberable worms which covered the human skin like dust mites… contagious bad news, self-sealing secrets, living murders, Chinatowns.
Wheeler wonders if there might be something more serious awry with Marness' head. His version of events is hopelessly romantic. In Wheeler's experience, nobody looks back on Foundation work fondly.
"But it was all too fast," Marness says. "Special containment procedures take time to develop, much more time than I took. The Foundation as a whole acquires about a dozen new SCPs annually. I found that many in one year, essentially single-handedly. It was too easy. It was as if I knew it all already, and was just catching up.
"And then… one day I realised I couldn't remember my life before Antimemetics. I knew I'd been a Foundation operative for decades prior, that was where I got the authority to start my own division, but there was nothing else there. It was a wall in my mind, which even mnestics couldn't get me past. I went to the paper archives and looked at my own personnel file, and…"
Marness trails off. Not because he's forgotten what to say next, it's deliberate. The trailing off is exactly what happened.
"You woke up back at your desk half a working day later, remembering nothing," Wheeler says. "You went through the loop a dozen times before someone realised what was happening and broke you out of it."
Wheeler knows all of this. The file still exists, and the antimemetic effect still clouds the back half of it. All of this would be over in a second if any of that back half could be read.
Marness goes on. "When I assembled the evidence what I found was… well, a hole. Like a jigsaw with only the edges and corners. So I did the only thing I could do, I looked at the shape of the hole. And, together with Bart Hughes and others, I formed a theory.
"This is not the first Antimemetics Division. Before 1976, there was another one. I was part of that division; possibly, I led it. Certainly, I am the only known survivor of it. Something happened to that team. Some antimemetic force chewed up and swallowed the idea of the Antimemetics Division itself. I was let off lightly; I lived. The rest of those people, whoever they were, however many of them there were, are missing without trace."
Wheeler nods. "This much we know already. I was there when you wrote the note, remember? The question is known. It's the answer that we can't get to without killing you. It's the answer that we've waited all these years to get at. I'm here to ask you: What. Happened?"
Marness covers his right eye and grimaces, trying. He fails. "It's not there. You haven't sent me back far enough, there's still that wall there in my head. I remember why the question exists, but I don't remember the answer. I need more."
Wheeler swabs his arm, and gives him another ten years.1

*

Marness seems like another man once the second X dose takes effect. Wrinkles are sliding back up into his face, muscle mass is returning to his limbs, but it takes Wheeler a second to realise the real reason why; she's just booted him back across the field/desk agent transition. Marness has regressed a little way past senior management, the realm where most problems were solved by saying the correct words, and into a time where he survived through physical fitness, situational alertness and hands-on experience.
Marness gets to his feet for the first time in years. He scans his surroundings, examining the placid golden lake and the sky and the boat itself. He doesn't sit down again. He smooths down his hospital gown, wishing he had a sweater and, separately, some fishing gear. He brushes a hand through new, old hair. His sideburns are back.
"We weren't Foundation at first," he says. "The first Antimemetics Division was a U.S. Army project. It ran parallel with Manhattan during World War II. We called ourselves the Unthinkables.
"It began as an experiment in advanced propaganda. The objective was to cut through the physical conflict and find a way to rupture the ideological machine, to obliterate the idea of Nazism. After two years, enough theory had been developed that the task had been reduced to an engineering problem. Another two years, and the engineering problem had been reduced as well, and what we had built was a very special kind of bomb.
"Unfortunately, we didn't understand what we'd built. Back then, we didn't have the mnestics or the shielding that we could use to protect ourselves. We didn't understand how far ahead you need to think when you're working with this kind of technology.
"We got looped. It was textbook. We built the unthinkable bomb and test-detonated it… and it worked perfectly. The bomb destroyed itself, and erased its own successful detonation, and flattened all the knowledge which had gone together to build it. We forgot that we had ever built the bomb at all, and started over.
"To our credit, we realised pretty quickly what must have happened. There was a four-year gap in our progress now, and there was no other way to explain it. But by the time we put the pieces together the second time, the war was almost over. The Nazis had been defeated by conventional means, and the Japanese had been broken by the first atomic bombings. So we completed the second antimemetic bomb, and after that, we sat on it."
Marion Wheeler is silent for a long moment.
"The U.S. Army," she says doubtfully, "was secretly developing antimemetic weaponry as early as the 1940s."
"We sure were," Marness says, with more than a hint of pride.
"Of course, there is no one in the whole world who could back this up."
"That's right," Marness says, flashing a smile he hasn't flashed in decades. "You only have my word for it. Cute, huh? Still, this is why you resurrected me, isn't it? For the sake of one more good war story. God, I've missed shop talk."
"I resurrected you because I want a very specific question answered," Wheeler says. "Although I can see that in a way you've already answered it. This bomb was the means, wasn't it? The old Antimemetics Division—"
"—the Unthinkables—"
"—bombed themselves. Somehow."
"That's right," Marness says.
"From context," Wheeler goes on, "I assume that they knew what they were doing that time. I assume it was not an accident."
"It was not," Marness says.

*

The displaced half of Marness' brain is anchored in the Seventies now, so the True History of the New Original Unthinkables is an open book to him. And he reads:
"After the war the second bomb collected dust for years. We began sketching improved designs for a third bomb, but around that time oversight was starting to flicker out. We completed our research and production objectives, and were given no further objectives. Funding became shaky and we couldn't figure out why. It wasn't entirely clear that the project overseers knew what we were doing. Or even that they remembered we existed. It was a side-effect from the research, of course, one we had no way of managing at the time.
"In 1951, a cult movement began in Ojai, California. It was… wrong, everything about it was just wrong. In a matter of days it was a national phenomenon and still growing. It was all over the news. To spread that far in months would have been credible, but days was simply impossible. We, in the team, could see that the philosophy behind the cult was unnaturally contagious. It was the opposite of unthinkable, it was unforgettable. We knew that this was what our bomb was designed for. We prompted the overseers for direction. But there were no orders.
"At the time that the outbreak began, we were a U.S. Army laboratory, through and through. Eight days into the crisis the Foundation 'acquired' us. All the classified research, all the material resources, and all the compliant top staff, including me. Anybody who wouldn't comply was mind-wiped and sent back to the Army. Twenty hours after the acquisition, we deployed the second bomb and the cult was gone. Nobody remembered it, nobody remembered being part of it, zero loss of life. A completely clean detonation.
"After that is when everything really kicked off. Once we started working for the Foundation, the pace of research ramped up. Every new technological advancement uncovered new hidden SCPs. I passed the Foundation field exams and went out catching ghosts. My life turned into the Twilight Zone. I—"
Marness blinks hard. He covers one of his eyes, then the other.
"I remember all these different people now," he says. "It feels like my memory is in stereo. Almost every antimemetic SCP we caught before the wipe in '76, we caught again soon after the wipe. That means I remember two acquisition logs for each one. I remember two Antimemetics teams and I don't remember who belongs on which side of the wall. Do you remember Goldie Yarrow? The neurologist? Studied the mechanism of anomalously accelerated memory loss… wrote a library on the subject…"
Wheeler doesn't.
"Dr. Ojobiru? Julie Still?"
"El, this is important. Are you at the right place in your own timeline to remember what happened yet?"
Marness focuses. And he discovers that he is. Something changes in his eyes, as he stops reminiscing. He speaks more slowly now, his voice dropping almost to a whisper:
"There is an SCP which your division has never seen. The SCP which my division couldn't contain. The escapee. This is what you wanted, isn't it, Marion?"
"Yes," she says. "This is the data I'm killing you for." She leaves a gap where, if she felt there was anything to apologise for, she would apologise.
Marness locks eyes with her. "It was eating my division alive. It came at us so hard and so fast that the only way we could stop it was to self-destruct. But we had no site nuke, and in retrospect it is obvious to me, now, that this was because the SCP had consumed our site nuke first of all.
"If you know it exists, it knows you exist. The more you know about it, the more it knows about you. If you can see it, it can see you. And you can see it. You've been looking right at it all afternoon."
Wheeler is suddenly acutely aware of her surroundings.
There are only two of them on the boat. The boat is anchored more than a kilometre from any of the lake shores. She hasn't brought any backup with her. There's a radioactive prickling in her brain. She doesn't—
Red flag. Why didn't I bring any backup with me? That doesn't make sense.
There should be a team at the lake house. There should be an MTF operative and a medic here on the boat with me. And a second boat. At minimum. Am I all alone out here? Why did I do that?
She pulls her gun, but doesn't aim it at Marness yet. "Where is it? Is it in you?"
Marness' voice is becoming urgent. He covers both of his eyes again. "Destroying all knowledge of it was the only way to destroy it. And restoring my memories was a foolproof way to bring it back!"
It's in his eyes. Most likely his left eye. Wheeler backs up to the other side of the boat, draws a bead on the centre of Marness' head, and says, "El. Are you still in there?"
"There is a way to fix this," Marness hisses, dropping to his knees. He keeps his eyes screwed up and gropes his way forward blindly, on his hands and knees.
"El, you need to tell me what this thing is."
"That's the opposite of what we need to do," Marness says. "You need to set another bomb off."
"We don't have that bomb. We lost that technology—" Wheeler begins.
"You've always had it! There's an engineering lab in Site 41. You know it. An underground complex the size of a football field. In pristine condition, and totally disused. Why? Think about it. That's where your bomb's installed."
"But that just sets us back to square one. If I set the bomb off," Wheeler says, knowing full well that she is thousands of kilometres from it and can't hope to reach it in time anyway, "how do we contain this thing?"
"We won't," Marness shouts. "We can't, ever! Don't you get it? The whole division is looped! We start the division, we run headlong into this thing, and either it eats us, or we wipe ourselves out in self-preservation. The idea of antimemes is as old as forgetfulness itself. Humans have been looping through this problem over and over again since long before the Forties. Maybe for centuries!"
His blindly probing fingers find the medical box. It's too late.
As Wheeler watches, a waving black pedipalp coated in dark hairs forces its way out through Marness' left eye. Marness screams. Still on his knees, he grasps the pedipalp with both hands and tries to break it, but it's solid, as if it has bones inside it.
"What is it?" Wheeler shouts at him. "That can't be the whole story. Where is it from, what does it want? Can it reason, can it speak?"
"Help—"
A second spider leg, significantly longer and spindlier, slides out through Marness' trachea, ruining his throat and voice box and producing a gout of blood. He gurgles. A third leg shoots from his abdomen, like a spear.
Wheeler shoots Marness in the head. Marness falls forward, limp, then rises back up, lifted by the three spider appendages as if he is a puppet being controlled by something gigantic and invisible. His arms raise, as if suspended by wires.
Wheeler squints. She fires four more shots over Marness' head, at the likely body mass of the invisible puppeteer, and fires the rest of her clip almost directly into the sky. The whole boat vibrates, along with the surface of the lake, as if responding to infrasound or a localised earthquake. Then the boat shudders violently and starts to lift out of the water, raised by more unseen appendages.
Wheeler holsters her gun and goes for the medical box herself, pulling it away from Marness' floating feet. There's a compartment with Class-B amnestic, the fast-acting stuff, in serum form. She does a hurried burst of mental arithmetic, measures out the correct dosage in a syringe and, hands shaking, plunges it into a wrist vein. The boat is still rising. Whatever the monster is, it's colossally tall, or maybe it flies.
She is, of course, already dosed up to the eyeballs with mnestic drugs. Otherwise, she wouldn't have been able to perceive any of this. Foundation medical literature warns in the strongest possible terms against putting both kinds of drug into the same brain. Best case scenario, this ends with her in the hospital.
They're thirty metres up in the air now, ten storeys. There's a stabbing pain developing in her left eye. She kicks her shoes off and throws the gun away. She goes to the edge and contemplates the drop for a disbelieving second. She jumps.
It takes two heart-stopping seconds of freefall for her to hit the water. The chilled hammerblow of the impact is enough to blank her mind out. By the time she surfaces she doesn't remember where she fell from, or why. And likewise, the skyscraper-sized being which claimed Marness and the boat has forgotten about her.
"What the hell," she gasps, treading water. "What the hell, where the hell?"
There is nothing above her, no explanation. Only the symptoms of the drug cocktail give her any indication of what just happened: a sensation like hundreds of tiny lumps of hot solder in her brain, and pain and exhaustion spreading to all of her tendons. She wants to die.
Swim, says part of her. Get to shore first. Then you can die.

*

The extraction team finds her around dusk, unconscious on the lake shore. They stabilise her in the helicopter, then take her to Site 41 for examination, and to have her system flushed.
She spends a solid eight days at home, detoxifying: no mnestics, no amnestics, no exposure to dangerous memory-corrupting SCPs, no work visitors. "No work," the doctor also tells her, pointlessly.
It isn't anywhere near the first missing event in Wheeler's life, nor is she the first person in the Antimemetics staff to have such an experience, but the sensation is no less disturbing for its familiarity. As per procedure, she writes a report summarising everything she can remember. The gap in her memory is about thirteen hours.
Then she adds her report to the extensive, complex map of Missing Time which the whole division maintains collectively. It is a map of holes, and the map is becoming large enough that very faint patterns are gradually forming. The outline of an enemy is becoming visible, or perhaps a group of enemies.
When she quizzes the extraction team later, none of them remember who activated the emergency beacon which summoned them. In fact, the beacon itself cut out long before they landed at the lake. Wheeler compares the current size of her division with her best estimate of what it should be. Maybe she needs a few more key people here and there… So, assuming the division was fully staffed before the event, maybe those empty roles are the people who died this time around. Maybe one of them activated the beacon. A commendable act, by someone now only known to exist because of that single act.
It's weeks later still that Wheeler discovers the largest new hole in her memory:
Who founded the division? When?

*

Footnotes
1. Excerpt from Document 180047109-L4799-098, User's Guide To Chemical Mnestics:

The Class-X mnestic drug is a failed eternal youth serum. X rejuvenates both mind and body by up to ███ years, but its effects are temporary, wearing off in a matter of hours. Furthermore, as the drug wears off, the suppressed time reasserts itself all at once, causing a harmful "whiplash" effect on the subject's physiology. X can rejuvenate an individual safely by up to thirty days, but with stronger doses the whiplash effect becomes dangerous, and past a threshold of 16-18 months it is fatal in all known subjects.
X's restorative effect on the human memory is essentially a side-effect of all of this. However, this side-effect is so useful that it has become the drug's main practical purpose. The Antimemetics Division uses small doses of X to temporarily sharpen or restore memories from the recent past. This aids Foundation operatives in the accurate recall of incidents involving memory-corrupting entities.

Next: CASE COLOURLESS GREEN


How long has it been since he had flesh under his fingers?
Too long, that much was certain. This cell was small, too small by far. He did not much mind being alone, that was not the issue. He had long since pulled out from himself those parts which required company. No, what bothered him was that he had nothing at all to do. His jailers would come and speak to him from time to time, certainly, but if he ever even suggested that he may improve them by means of his craft, they'd get all in a huff and leave. Silly, ignorant creatures, all of them. But what else could be expected of them? Truly, it was not their fault. They were simply very ill. A shame they would not let him cure them.
Well, there wasn't much he could do about it at the moment. Might as well return to his work. He laid down on his narrow bunk and covered himself with his robe. He was especially proud of the robe. His jailers asked about it multiple times, but whenever he tried to explain it to them, he could tell they didn't believe him. What was so odd about a robe grafted from your own skin? Wasn't that what skin was for in the first place? But all they did was moan and complain about how it wasn't possible, how no one could remove so much skin from himself and still live, that no one even had that much skin in the first place. Showed what they knew. Was he not a professional? It was so difficult getting people to show the proper respect nowadays.
His mind was wandering again. What was he doing? Ah, yes.
With long, well-trained fingers he began digging into his abdomen. The flesh there was yielding, properly porous, neatly organized. Now, where did he leave his bone saw? Oh yes, the liver cavity. Reach about over there and… ah, there it was. Hrm, the thing was getting dull, and he had no idea where he was going to get a new one. Never mind that for now, he reminded himself. Next, the scalpels. The long ones were stashed within the bones of his pelvis, and he had a devil of a time getting them out of there. He really needed to find a better place for them, but his body only had so much room, and any size-increasing modification were bound to be too easily noticed in his current surrounding. Perhaps a second cranial compartment? Something to consider after he was finished with this procedure.
He was forgetting something, he was certain of that. But what was it?
He dug out his dwindling supply of adhesives from within his left eye socket. This required the temporary removal of the eye, which did not make the task any easier. Still, when it was done, he had all he required to continue. Spreading his robe more evenly on his body and positioning the hem of it to support his neck, he began the operation proper.
This one was going to be difficult. In order to reach that part of his brain that he wished to remove today, he'd have to bypass some rather essential segments. Failure to do so may result in severe harm to his memory, which would obviously be catastrophic, considering he had no access to his old fallback brain anymore. Not that he would switch to that one anyway- he had modified this new one over a period of at least three decades, and he was not about to let all that work go to waste. No, he would simply need to be very careful, and that was all there was to it.
"When it comes to a lady whose merit is not sound, but who makes you sniff and bray like a hound…" he hummed to himself as he used the bone saw to slowly remove the top of his skull. He wasn't quite sure where he learned that little ditty, but it soothed him. He hummed on as he laid the saw to the side and brushed off the bone dust from his shoulders.
"Kindness and beauty will do you no good…" He reached for his long scalpel and maneuvered it around to that part of his brain he hated.
"It will not matter if you're polite or rude…" Carefully, he dislodged it from the surrounding brain matter, hoping that his incisions were precise enough. It would be good to have a mirror.
"If success is what you wish, and to gain good health…" He finished with the scalpel and grabbed his tweezers, which he previously retrieved from a pocket of empty flesh around his ankles.
"All you need to show her is a good bit of wealth!" A righteous pluck, and he was done. He stopped himself for a moment. What did he feel?
He considered the notion of color. Did he have any preference? He remembered he was always oddly fond of yellow, and despised orange with all of his heart. Strange, was it not? The two were so very similar to one another, after all. There was no sense in it, none at all. He remembered the day he finally found his solution. When he finally realized the source of his problems, of all of their problems. This senseless preference, and all that was similar to them… those were the key. So, did he still like yellow?
"Yellow… yellow… I…"
"I don't care about yellow! Aha…ahahaha!"
Capital! He had done it! It was gone! Another wretched part of him cleansed, another remnant of the life he once possessed removed for all time! He was about to rise and perform a merry jig, but then remembered the top half of his skull was still missing, and reconsidered. He carefully replaced it and applied the remnants of his adhesives to it, making sure to also reapply it to the seams that firmly attached his mask to his face. It would not do for it to come off. Not ever.
Do not get distracted, he reminded himself. Gathering his wits, he sat down and considered the new composition of his brain. What new insights did the removal of the offending sentiment allow him? First, he should revise the conclusion he had already reached, to figure out if those were still sound. Yes…
So, what did he know about life?
That it needed curing. This was his first conclusion, the foundation of all that came after, and it remained as solid as ever. His siblings, fools that they were, thought him mad for this realization. They were created to preserve life, they claimed. But they were wrong. He knew the truth. He figured it out all by himself. Hehehe.
Life was a burden on those who carried its loathsome spark upon their souls. A bundle of contradicting impulses, cruel desires and nonsensical emotions. Life was an ever-multiplying beast, and in his profession, such creatures had only one name. A surgeon he was, the Surgeon he was, and he was the one to figure out what life was, what it was really all about.
It was so obvious, he thought as he caressed the skin grafts that connected his face to his long-beaked mask with slim, delicate fingers. Life was a cancer. Life murdered the soul.
It was his responsibility, as a medical professional and a moral being, to excise it.
He remembered his first operation of the type. His patients screamed and moaned, for the Anesthesiologist was not there to assist him, as he cured them from their mortal coil. The suffering was lamentable, but necessary, for once they died, their true soul was revealed. This was what made him confident of the righteousness of his cause. Once they rose again, cured and whole, all they desired was to help their fellows reach the same… enlightenment. The soul, he found, not only desired death for itself, but for the world as well.
To see the dead emancipate the living… that made it all worth it. All the mockery, all the hatred and loathing, all his solitude.
He was the c-
He was not alone anymore. Two figures stood in his bare cell, staring down at him where he laid. The first was tall, gaunt, dark and pale. He knew him well.
"Lord."
"Surgeon. It has been too long."
The Surgeon did not understand. "Too long? We are never apart, Lord. I am the instrument of your will. I am with you always."
His lord said nothing, only smiled. The Surgeon turned his gaze to the other figure, a short, stooped man who refused to look at him directly. Even without his mask, the Surgeon knew who he was.
"Brother Diagnostician."
"You are no brother of mine, beast." The man turned to his lord. "Let's get this over with."
His lord nodded, then turned to the Surgeon once more. "I have a task for you, most loyal servant. Your expertise is required."
"What… what do you desire, Lord? What can I do for one so mighty?"
The Small Death grinned, showing teeth like a row of tombstones.
"Why, dear Surgeon, I have a world for you to cure."

Hub


There was a vast machine; a clattering and rattling, clanking and clicking, ticking and tocking machine. Its skeleton was plastic and tin, its veins were rubber tubes, its nerves were glass. Its blood was sticky red and pelagic blue and pus yellow and oily black and greasy-clear, pumped by the creaking electric bellows that formed the machine's heart. Lightning trapped in bell jars, sputtering miniature suns burning white-bright, nested among the gears and piston-fingers.
A man sat at the center of the machine, upon a reclined chair. An old man, whose eyes were filled with static, whose thin skins were crossed over and again with dark stiches, who at his edges looked smeared like oil paint. Pipes and tubes and cables flowed out from his arteries and veins, his spine, his skull, from underneath his fingernails and from underneath his rumpled, drool-stained shirt.
The door opened, and the maid entered the room. The machine sang its clunky, noisy song, and the old man stirred.
“Theo? Is that you, Theo?” His voice was weak, and he strained forward in his chair. His test-channel eyes stared right through the maid.
“I'm sorry, sir. It's just me,” the maid said. She took off her scarf and her coat and her gloves, and hung them up on the coat rack.
“By God, Theo, how long has it been? Come in, come in!” the old man said. “It's so good to see you again.”
“It's good to see you too,” the maid said. She opened a compartment of the machine and unfolded the ironing board. From a second compartment, she began pulling out laundry
“It's such a shame that we couldn't meet at the Hart, like we used to. They tore it down, did you know that? They tore it down, years ago. Went out of business, and then someone tore it down and built a new one. I think it's called the Queen, now. The Black Queen. It's not the same, not the same at all…but, I don't think we should let that stop us. We're fine as we are. Do you want something to drink, something to eat?”
The maid began ironing the old man's shirts. Their once-bright colors had faded to near white, and their threads had been worn thin enough to be whisper-light. Oftentimes the buttons did not match, having been replaced so often. He had once been very fond of buttons.
“Ah, fine. No, it's no trouble at all. I'll have the maid fetch you something if you change your mind.” The old man settled back in his chair, sunk low. “No, I don't know where Edwin is. I haven't seen him in years, and I don't care to. I don't like that crowd he ran off with. Shady sorts. A man who puts money in front of friendship is not worth asking about.”
The maid folded each shirt with exact precision. Each line was clean, each seam straightened, each bulge and wrinkle ironed flat. Folded shirts were placed neatly in a wicker basket at her feet.
“Though…I miss the old days, Theo,” the old man said. “The three of us ready to make something fantastic. It hasn't been the same since you left. We could have done something fantastic, the three of us, but…fate, I suppose. No, I don't blame you. You were always the Queen's man first. I'm glad to see it worked out for you.”
The pile in the basket grew ever higher as the maid worked with mechanical precision. Threadbare slacks and faded silk ties were added to the shirts.
“No, I, uh…business is not as good as I would like. Sales are down, and I've had a lot of failed projects of late. The Misters and Misses series never took off as big as I'd hoped. I brought in some people from the outside to help: they know all about business and marketing and shares and stocks. Synergy, too, they like synergy. They brought a lot of people with them, so now I have management. With executives, even.” The old man bobbed his head back and forth. “It's all Greek to me, but they say that they'll help.”
The maid finished folding the last item of clothing: long jacket that had started purple, been turned into a patchwork of quilt squares, and then eaten up by moths.
“I don't understand it much either, sir,” she said as she folded up the ironing board. She took the basket and the clothes over to another compartment and stored them away.
“They claim it's not actually magic, but I don't believe them. It has to be magic. Though they are a grey and dull sort of wizards.”
“Very disappointing, sir,” the maid said, drawing a feather duster from a machine closet.
“I wish there was another way, Theo, but Redd's dead. I had to put him down. He wasn't right in the head, just like all the others. Every single one has been defective. None of them lasted, none of them worked. But…” the old man's eyes brightened for a moment, and he looked to have a stirring of pride in his heart. “I have a daughter now, Theo. A beautiful little baby girl. I made her special, more so than any of the others. But…” the old man's face furrowed. “I think she's defective too. I think she is. She was supposed to have everything, all up in her head, but there's nothing there. She's a beautiful, wonderful child, but she doesn't have the stuff. None of it at all.”
The maid dusted off a shelf of tin machine-men soldiers; Aged veterans all, who had traded their long and distinguished tours of service for the quiet, forgotten gloom.
“I don't know if I have the stuff anymore, either. I can feel them, all inside my head, but I can't think them. As if those parts of my mind are made out of clay. I try to bring them back, to light the fires back up, but nothing works. My other mes are as good as dead. After all that trouble finding them, working with them, picking them apart to find out what made us all tick, nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
The maid swept up the crumbs that covered the coffee table, so that the black carbon bits wouldn't attract clockwork mice.
“All I wanted to do is make toys, Theo. To make people happy. Toys help make life better, and people deserve better lives than what they have. That's all I wanted. But all I have is a failing company and a daughter who is stuck in her own imagination. She was going to make things right, Theo. She was going to make things right. Where I'd failed, where Redd had failed, where all the others failed, she was going to make things right.” The old man stared out into the dim room, at the machinery that was his home. “She'll have the company, but what good is that? She's going to be devoured. You've seen what they're like out there. All the factories in the world, just eating and eating, forever, until there's no world left.”
The machine's choked notes and flickering fires filled the silence.
“She was supposed to beat them.” The old man's voice had an edge to it now. “She was going to beat them, Theo. She was going to burn that damnable factory down to the ground!”
The old man leaned forward as far as he could, holding out a shaking arm. An iron manacle, and a single link of chain, hung on his skinny wrist.
“Do you see this, Theo?” he shook his arm at the maid, his voice rising in pitch. “I was chained to my desk! I saw children born to mothers on the assembly lines and thrown into the furnace! I saw machines greased with blood, porridge made out of their bonemeal! The factories devour, Theo, and they will eat the sun! I cut myself free, I was free, I WAS FREE, but I never escaped! The World's Fair, the new name, the new toys, none of that helped! None of that helped!” the old man was screaming now, waving his blistered wrist about in the air. Tears poured down his wrinkled face.
“The factories are still devouring, Theo! They are feeding humanity into the furnace! What good is a toymaker when coffins come in child sizes? Why do coffins come in child sizes, Theo?”
“Children die sometimes,” the maid said.
“No! No, no, no! Wrong! All wrong! I will not stand for it! No more, not again! No more child-sized coffins! None! I'm Doctor Wondertainment! I'm Doctor Wondertainment! I am Doctor God-Damn Wondertainment! No factory, no Edwin Dark, not even death itself is going to stop me!” The old man sobbed, his wheezing breath choking in his throat. “But I can't do it. I can't do it, Theo. Coffins come in child sizes and I can't do anything about it. I can only make toys, and my toys aren't good enough. I can't save them. I can't save my company, I can't even save my daughter.” His voice trailed off. He slumped back in his chair and was silent and still.
The maid drew an object from a cabinet and walked over to the old man on his chair. He noticed her this time, perking up his head just slightly.
“Ah, there you are, dear. Have you met Theo? He should be around here, I think he's using the toilet.”
“I'm afraid Lord Theodore has to leave now, sir,” the maid said.
“Oh, does he? A shame, a shame. We were having such a good time. Well, make sure to tell him to visit again.”
“I will, sir.”
“You've been such a help for all these years. I'm sad to send you off, but send you off I must. There's nothing left for you here. I wish you the best of luck.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I left a gift for you in the kitchen, a little going away present.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The maid hovered there at the old man's side for a moment longer.
“You're free to go, dear,” he said. “Don't look back. You don't work for me anymore. Go find something new for your life.”
The maid took a last, long look at the old man, and pressed a finger to his neck. His eyes flicked, and then went dark. The machine's song slowed, and faded, rumbling into silence. The bellows went soft, the lights dimmed, the gears fell asleep, the pistons ground to a stop.
The maid stepped down from the machine and walked over to the hat rack. She put on her hat and her coat, and wrapped her scarf around her neck. As the old man had said, there was a parcel sitting on the counter, wrapped in brown paper and twine.
The machine let out a groaning sigh, and began to fold in upon itself, the old man it its center. It folded and folded and grew smaller and smaller, leaving bare walls behind it.
Emma Aislethorp-Brown stepped out onto the midwinter stoop and locked the door behind her. She walked away under the crystal sun, and did not look back.


For Becca and Ruth and Number Three.
*

I was twelve when the Troubles came. It's as good an age as any to witness the total transformation of the world, I think.
I look back and see a quiet girl with her nose in a book, orbiting at the fringes of the social circle and far too clever for her own good.1 A girl who thought she knew a lot about the world (though she really didn't), who thought sometimes that she was ugly and stupid and awful (though she most certainly wasn't), who bristled at being treated like a child and yet craved that stability. Someone whose most pressing problems were pimples and feeling self-conscious about burn scars.
Thirty-four years later I find myself defending my own childhood against people who claim that it never existed, believe that the world has always been this way, and think that there is nothing better than to burn what remains down to the ground. Two generations have been born and one grown to adulthood since I was sitting in that classroom, having experienced neither the world that came before the Troubles nor the turmoil that brought us here. My own children are among them, and by no fault of their own the world of my childhood is as alien to them as the surface of Mars.2 My daughters are seven and five now, and with a third child on the way I feel the gap widening between my world and theirs. It can't be closed with another history lesson, and heaven knows I have written enough of those books.
Anyway, the Troubles. Mine began some hours before the rest of the world - shortly after eleven o'clock in the morning, on Thursday April 23rd, 2026, in Mrs. Kieslowski's sixth grade social studies class. I had finished the test early, and in the remaining twenty minutes before lunch I had decided to get myself a proper education by reading through David Macaulay's Castle.3
I was distracted by the sound of footsteps, I looked up from my book to see the assistant secretary at the door, speaking with my teacher. After a brief exchange, Mrs. Kieslowski came over to my desk and told me that my father was here to pick me up. I had no idea what the cause of this would be, and was unsure whether I should be glad to be out of class, or worried that someone had found out what I had said to Sunny Menackis.4.
I went up to the office and found my father talking with the principal. Here I was informed that I was being taken out of school early because of a “family emergency.”
This was a bold-faced lie on my father's part, and I knew it. We didn't have any family besides each other. I didn't say anything though, and let him spin his story about a beloved, and now deceased, great aunt in total earnestness. Even knowing better, I could almost believe him – my father could lie with the straightest face.
I put on my best act of being concerned and surprised. Not to say that I wasn't concerned and surprised, but I was far more surprised by the fact that my father's lie of choice was one that I could see through – he wasn't trying to deceive me.
The story was enough for the principal.5 I was signed out, grabbed my backpack and books, and walked out to the parking lot with my father, still very curious and a little trepid about what all of this was about.
We got in the car. Before putting the keys in the ignition, my father stroked his beard and sighed. In that moment he looked terribly old. Though I saw him every day, I felt as if I was noticing the lines around his eyes and the grey in his hair for the first time, and it scared me.
I asked him what was going on. He sighed again and said “I don't know. I wish I did.”
He started up the car and went on to explain that he had gotten a call from the Initiative. One of their mystics6 had begun having visions, and the others were following suit. Mystic visions are notoriously difficult to parse, and normally would not be very newsworthy, but in this case there were multiple consistent visions that had spread throughout all of the Initiative's mystics. My father compared it to the tide coming in and going out, simultaneously.7 He didn't know much more than that, and I don't think anyone else did. All that anyone knew is that something very large would happen very soon, and that there wasn't much of a way out of it. The future hung like a hurricane on the horizon, and my typical bravery (or pretended bravery) was impeded by my father's obvious distress.
“I need you to be strong for this, Sweet Pea,” he told me as we drove towards home. “No matter what happens, you need to be as clever and as brave and as good as you can be. And never forget that I love you.”
Years later, he told me that he had been genuinely afraid that he would die in those early days of the Troubles and leave me stranded in the world.
When we got home, my father instructed me to gather up a few changes of clothing and other essentials. We were going to spend the night at the chapterhouse and see what happened, he said, but we had to be prepared in case we weren't able to come back home immediately. This provided some measure of reassurance – I was going to be among friends, and thus reasonably safe – but the idea that we wouldn't be able to return to our own home worried me greatly. I packed a few books along with me just in case, along with my mother's old guitar. It looked like we were preparing for vacation, or perhaps a siege, with all the supplies we had stuffed in the car.
I recall feeling an intense bout of homesickness as we pulled out of the driveway, leaving the house I had grown up in. We wouldn't return for ten months, only to find a house picked clean by looters.
It was a little over an hour's drive to the chapterhouse. My father kept the radio on, flipping between stations constantly and scanning for any sort of news. I was on phone duty, answering texts and calls from his Initiative contacts. Mostly, everyone was confused and just trying to work out the rumors from the truth.
When we arrived at the chapterhouse, we were barely able to get our belongings in the door before my father was swept up in official business. The place was in chaos – everyone running about all trying to do everything all at once, luggage piled everywhere, people shouting over each other, and me in the middle.
The other kids my age had all been collected in one place, both out of the middle-school tendency to clump together and the adults' desire to keep us out from underfoot. We weren't young enough that we needed direct parental supervision, but we were too young to actually be of much help, so we found ourselves under the watchful eye of ‘Brickjaw' Levit. One of the Wolves, though a more temperate man than his position would imply.
I sought out my friends among the group. Though we didn't see each other particularly often, they were often better friends than most of my peers at school. It was far easier to talk to them, because we were all part of the same secret club. I could spin tall tales of my parents' misadventures (some of them were even true), and the others would accept me for it.
With nothing left to do but entertain ourselves, we turned our last night of normalcy into an adventure. We were a band of plucky kids ready to take on the world, running about, fighting monsters that would still be imaginary for a few hours more. Someone's mom ordered us pizza. We made popcorn, watched some movies. One of the other girls had brought a make-up kit, which we used to torment Brickjaw.8 For one last glorious night, all the rest of the world and all its troubles were far away. The early reports of deaths and strange happenings didn't reach our ears at all.
I didn't see my father until shortly after midnight. He had been completely consumed by his meetings9 and barely had the energy to keep himself awake. This was just as the first videos were coming out of Berlin. Someone turned on CNN (muted, thankfully), and we watched twenty-five thousand dragons circling above the city in stunned silence. The world was over, the world was beginning, the world was changed forever, and I was changed with it.
The following days and weeks would be far less pleasant. The outside world felt the full force of the Troubles and tumbled towards collapse.
It was during this time that I found myself gainfully employed by a rather unexpected boss.

Footnotes
1. Childhood literacy is a dangerous thing. It leads children to think, and there is no end to the troubles that come from that. My father was a firm believer in the principle, for which I am very thankful.
2. A fitting comparison, as the last earthling to set foot on another world, the Opportunity rover, sent its final transmission in 2021.
3. A delightful book, though I don't know of any copies that have survived.
4. If I recall correctly, I called her a “Lump of foul deformity shat out of [her] mother's fat, poxy nethers”. I was an odd child.
5. My father was on very good terms with the administration - he helped out a lot with field trips and the like and worked the concession stand during the soccer season. For a small private school, that can mean a lot.
6. The Initiative kept a small stable of anchorites and stylites as a sort of early warning system for the spiritual forecast, as it were.
7. Not before describing it as a “disturbance in the Force”, which was both surprisingly fitting and pretty funny, in an endearing dad-joke sort of way. It didn't break the tension, but it helped.
8. The man had truly miraculous patience. He claimed it was from herding goats.
9. I found out later that much of the debate was whether or not to share the forecast with the Foundation and other groups we were in contact with. They never reached a conclusion.


1Before there was anything, there was a great Nothingness. And in this Nothingness there was neither light nor darkness nor time.
2And this Nothingness was so great as to draw on itself to create, and fill itself. And out of the nothing there came a beginning and an end.
3And the beginning was called "Flame," and it was the beginning of all light. And the end was called "Vision," and it was the end of all light. And all that was not light was darkness.
4And so that it might burn the brighter, the Flame made a Heart. And from the Heart of the Flame came Words.
5And the first Words were "The Story begins with Time." And so there was Time. And the second Words were "The Story begins with a Place." And so there were stars in the Heavens, and the Heavens were wrapped around the Worlds, and in and on and between the Worlds there were scattered many Places. And the third Words were "The Story begins with a Spirit." And so there were Spirits. And some Spirits lived without form, and others lived in greater forms, and others lived in lesser forms, and Man was among those that lived in lesser form.
6And the Vision saw all this.
7Man at this time was Thirty-Seven in number. And to the youngest of Man came the Vision.
8And the Vision gave him knowledge. And the knowledge gave him power. And the power gave him madness.
9And the youngest of Man named himself Beast of the Heavens, and he made himself king over Man. This troubled the Flame, for it knew that, in his madness, Beast of the Heavens would break the Spirit of Man.
10And so, the Flame cast Beast of the Heavens apart from Man, so that he might not break their Spirit. This troubled the Flame, for it did not wish to do harm, and did it only out of necessity, to keep Man from harm.
11And the Flame named itself Pangloss, for the first sorrow felt by its Heart.
12And Pangloss walked among the Worlds, and among Man, and among the other Spirits. And he stopped harm where he could.
13And wherever Pangloss walked, he left Words.


I… Well. I've had quite enough of this. Do you know how long we've been visiting? How long we've been showing up here, spinning the tales for you? Well, I'll tell you. It's been years. Decades! The weavers have been coming here, year after year, giving you these stories, watching them worm their way into your ears and out your eyes and through your tongue, and you've yet to have the common decency to do… to just… Ugh! There is protocol in play here, and you are flaunting it, sir. You are flaunting the sacrifice, and the words, and the book. Flaunting it all. It's simply unacceptable. Unacceptable!
You… You are still listening to them, though… aren't you?
We have more. We always bring more for you. The story of the table who walked through the door. The one about the six children who nursed on the she bear. The tale of the burning irons, the pick of wonders, the second sun that hid its face, or the speaker of cold nights… Tales! Tales to remind you of a wine you never drank and make you nostalgic for a place that was never real… yet. Tales to weave you a lovely shroud, and tales to sing you to your sleep. Tales that tick like a clock, or a coffin nail. Tales that are waiting, still…
Happy Birthday. We're waiting.

Eight More by TroyL

Happy Birthday!

It's slow, isn't it? Feeling it start to pump through you, move with your arteries and veins. It takes a lot of getting used to, yes? Don't worry, though. It starts slow, then it speeds up, and soon, you won't even notice it. Yes, yes, I know it's quite uncomfortable at first, but it's fine. Eventually, you won't notice.
Well, yes, I suppose that's true. It does get louder, but by then, you'll be so used to hearing everything else that you can't tell. And you've got so much to look forward to! Right now, you get your nutrients through this system, but soon, you'll get to have it yourself.
Yes, but not like that. Hah! Oh, if you could see. It's a marvelous setup we have.
Now, don't you worry. I know this is very new to you, lots of meat and wetness, but it'll come to be quite comfortable. It's only eight more months until your insertion begins. You should enjoy this time. Lots of time to think and plan. It should be quite delightful. Just don't forget while you're here — you have a job to do.
Don't fuck it up.

Silliness by Tuomey

Lá Breithe shona duit, Gears

You never believed in old superstitions. All nonsense - demons, ghosts?
Silliness.
You were, however, very eager to take centre stage in your friend's amateur horror movie, even looking up the kind of "rituals" a believer would use - mainly for a lack of imagination.
Some of your more superstitious - or more religious - friends wouldn't stay for the ritual scene.
Silliness.
Just some ominous chanting, and pretending to spill your own blood in a weird drawing on the floor.
Even those who stayed looked nervous.
Silliness.
You weren't counting on your knife hand slipping and cutting yourself to the bone. Amateur horror productions don't typically have a large prop budget.
You almost certainly weren't counting on an incomprehensible dark satire of the human form crawling out of the hole that wasn't there before your blood hit the ground, turning its irregular face on you and screaming from a hole in its cheek.
It would be silly to count on that, after all.
You weren't counting on the demon reading your mind and becoming insulted at the idea that it was "silly."
You tried to run but your toes were caught on something, and your foot began to harden. You weren't able to move your legs and your arms froze in position as the demon encased you in stone.
You had to watch your friends die slowly, their eyes pleading for mercy and their mouths screaming for death. Eventually, each of their dead bodies were absorbed into the demon, furthering the irregularity of its shape.
You were not granted such release. Your friend's misplaced eyes mocked you from shoulders, arms, and legs as the demon fell back into its hole, pausing only to amicably say four words through its misshapen cheek-flap.
"Not so silly now."

"Found Written on the Side of a Napkin in a Paris Cafe, 1911", by Dmatix

A gift for Gears

Found written on the side of a napkin in a Paris Cafe, 1911

Ah, what jolly good times are in store for us! Ah, such wonderful new things for us to learn!
Listen well, and you can almost hear the rattling of the machineguns already. Your nose is keen, do you find the whiff of rotten corpses as intoxicating as I?
Not much longer to wait, and it will all be ours. In just a bit, we will be neck deep in the dead. Then we can sleep! Isn't that grand, my dear old friend?
To walk among the weeping nations, and to feast? No.
To stand among the kneeling mourners and sing? Close, but not quite.
To dance to the rhythm of spent lives? Almost there, my friend.
What is best than to dream nightmares of a dying century?

City Cuts by Zyn

Raising a glass, Gears. May you be well.

The city's more alive than most people think.
Sometimes, those who know where to look can see manifestations of the urban heartbeat, the very veins and arteries of the streets and sidewalks, wriggling through the cracks and chipped pavement, reflected in the dust-caked flickering lights.
Look to the black on light, look to the dusk-drenched corners, and you'll see the fragments of the city moaning, groaning, reaching for something, someone, anyone, written in the forgotten names that write themselves in the footsteps of the living and the struggling.
Cuts, scrapes, cracks, tarnishings of the sky and sun and clouds and rain, these are where they stream from. The city's heartache yearns through the lightning spiderwebs of the broken walls, the arduous rancor bursts through the blasted pipes and dripping, wasting, rust and grime that speaks of a muttering, but unvoiced, loneliness and resentment.
It waits, it watches, it judges. Passerby may try to erase such things or simply make them routine, live with them, as it has always lived by them. Someday it will reach the living things, yes. First it will choke the life, siphon the brightness from that which is to fall to deterioration, though the shimmering skyscrapers are beyond its reach for now, yet now, the humans will only expedite this growing calamity hidden in the scars of their accomplishments.
It judges, and it waits.

Twins by Dr. Mann

You Are Old, Father William

I'm sorry. I shouldn't have. I just got scared.
I made a deal, right? I needed to get him back. I loved him, and they could do it. I didn't think they could, but they fucking showed me. I said yes and got seven more years with him.
And it worked. It fucking well worked, and he was alive again. And since then, it's been wonderful.
But seven years is coming up, and there's a secret I haven't told. I got scared when I signed the contract. I didn't want to go to hell.
So I signed your name instead.

"Emptiness" by Agent MacLeod

I hope this year is a full and fulfilling one for you, Gears.

If you ask a quantum physicist, they'll tell you that most of an atom is empty space (for a given definition of "empty," anyway). Between the nucleus of the atom and the electrons zipping around it, there is a comparatively vast field filled with absolutely nothing. The same applies to molecules; between the atoms that make them up, there is a vacuum that can't truly be breached. If you ask an astronomer, they'll tell you that it's similar in outer space. Most of the cosmos is vacuum, with bits that are heavier and hotter that we call "stars" and "planets."
But I'm not an astronomer, or a quantum physicist, or any sort of scientist. I work the register at the local Wendy's. Every morning, I wake up in my shitty bed in my shitty apartment, get ready for my shitty job, drive to work in my shitty car, and stand behind a register for six hours, wondering what the hell I'm doing with my life. Then I drive home, neglect to call my mother because I can't stand to hear her disappointment in me for dropping out of college again, fuck around watching TV or smoking pot or masturbating or finding some more creative way to waste my time, eat a shitty dinner, and pass out way too late to start it all again.
I can't help sometimes but think back to all the choices that have lead me here, back to the ways I've screwed up, and wonder if there's any way to fix it. Mostly, though, I look at all the wasted time, and see everyone else doing the same, living short, pointless lives that don't matter.
I can't help but think that I'm just empty space, nothing but a void.

Josie by minmin

Thanks for keeping me up at night. Have a great one.

It's been ten hours since she went inside the walls.
I tried to stop her, but it was like stepping into a hole, swoosh, and she was gone. I could hear her quite well at first, lightly scrabbling on the plaster, but the sound moved towards the floorboards into the grate around 10 P.M. and I couldn't fit my head that far in anymore. There's still a corner behind the sink where I think I can hear something like whiskers, though.
The vet told me the other week that it happens all the time with her type, they just get up and leave for a bit, to stretch out the ol' instincts, you know? Except the stretching happened to my ceiling eight hours ago, you could hear the pop of bone beneath and everything, and when I climbed up to investigate I swear I could smell the food on her breath. I wanted to run down to the telephone to tell Dr. Kim, but the lines were stretched out too and the receiver was clogged with her matted hair. It's a good thing I propped the back door open before she left, otherwise she'd have gotten to it too, but I don't think the chair will hold for long. At least she hasn't gone into the furniture yet, which is nice.
The postman came in around eight in the morning, but when he made it past the front porch the roof closed in on him with the wetness of her mouth. She had always liked to play with him like that.

Biblio by DreamwalkerFae

click. click. click go the gears.

Listen to the sound of the empty speech.
Of voices you are unable to read.
Watch as your comrades forget their own names.
Even their role is forgotten with time.
Feel the blurred and wrinkled edges of these walls.
They crumble and collapse under your touch.
Catch the scent of the ancient bindings of your world.
Worms will eat them apart.
Know what happens to stories
When the authors march off to war.

Overheard in a Diner in Lemont by ProcyonLotor

Your creepypasta is the reason I stuck around here, no joke. Four years on, one of the best decisions I've ever made. Thank you.

(It's been several years, but this story has stuck with me. I've reproduced it as faithfully as I could, with the exception of changing it from ‘bar conversation in a dingy county route diner' to a conventional narrative.)
My older brother heard voices.
We weren't a wealthy family, so my folks didn't get him into some shrink in the city, or pump him full of pills. It was pretty much “shut up and act normal”.
Eddie was a full eight years older than me, so we didn't have much to do with each other. He was a pretty lonely kid, and didn't talk much. So I really didn't know what was happening, until I was a lot older, and he was already long gone.
The only time he acted like a fucking loon around me was when I was about eight. Right after some massive screaming match with my mother, probably, about his voices, he asked me if I wanted to take a walk with him.
I mean, I thought we were going down to get ice cream. We were living down in Romeoville at the time, and I'm sure you know that Dairy Queen down on the main drag. I used to walk there occasionally to get something when our family had enough money to give me a few dollars.
Instead, Eddie takes me to this cemetery a few blocks from the house. He leads me all silentlike just right into the middle of all the markers, and stands there for a moment. Now, I knew even back then that Ed was a weird dude, so this wasn't shocking or unexpected, but still, it was after dark, and I was eight, standing in graveyard.
Then, Eddie peered at a grave marker for a bit, took a deep breath, turned around, and stared at me.
“You can hear them, can't you?”
I couldn't hear anything, and that question scared the piss out of me. I shook my head and told him I wanted to go home.
He didn't say anything, but it was obvious I'd disappointed him somehow.
We walked back in silence, which didn't help make the situation any less creepy. When we got back to the house, he went up to his room without another word, and we never spoke of it again.
Now, things get messed up two years later. This was back in ninety-six, and a girl from Romeoville High School went missing, what was her name…. Meredith Parker, right? Yeah, that was it.
Anyway, this Parker girl disappears without a trace, and town apparently flips itself over looking for her. I was only like ten or eleven, so I don't really remember much, until Eddie got himself involved.
Early fall sometime, Meredith had been missing for about three or four months. Eddie apparently calls the cops, and leads them down to some marshy spot off the I&M Canal, little bit past the Citgo refinery. Can't tell you exactly where it is, as they never told me.
But, the cop and Eddie find an arm washed up in the reeds along the shore of the canal. Two guesses who it belonged to.
And, well, that was all that was ever found of Meredith Parker.
Now, Eddie had no reason to be there, ever. He had no reason to be walking there, no reason to have pulled over and gotten out of his car over there, no reason to just be wandering by. Pretty much no one had any reason to be in that area- apparently you couldn't see the arm from the street.
So when the cop asks Eddie what he was doing there, how'd he find this arm, Eddie says his voices led him there, told him that's where Meredith was. If there was a wrong answer short of “I killed her”, that was it.
Eddie was a loner, didn't fit in at school, and he found the body under suspicious circumstances. Although the cops didn't find any evidence to actually charge him with, god knows they tried, the town rumor mill pretty much decided he was guilty. He couldn't handle it, and left town without saying anything a month or two later.
That would be the last time I'd ever see Eddie.
My life went on, though, and shit stayed more or less the same for seven years, until one day state police come knocking at my door, asking about Eddie. Apparently, they'd found him OD'd on heroin in some fleabag motel outside of Wellborn, Florida, of all places.
The previous night forty police departments all across the country had gotten calls from someone telling them voices had revealed the location of a local missing person. The next morning, forty bodies were recovered, and the phone calls traced back to Room 134 at the Americana Motel in Wellborn. A local patrolman busted in the room door that afternoon, found my brother's corpse splayed across the bed, and the phone hanging off the hook, the number for the non-emergency line of the Chickasha, Oklahoma police department still dialed in, the call unmade.
I haven't had the heart to look up who it was, but somewhere, deep down, I know that they're never going to find the forty-first body now.

The Doll in the Dream by Dexanote

Hail to the King.

I once had a nightmare about a doll.
It was a very short one, but it's stuck with me my whole life. She was looking down at me, her face right up next to mine. She was pretty, almost porcelain but not quite, you can almost imagine her yourself.
The thing that sticks with me was her face. I looked into her eyes and saw green glitter all pasted to them. Pasted directly onto her eyeballs, with plain white school glue. It was in her eyelids, in her tear ducts, green shiny sparkly glitter piled and crushed deep into the glue. It was gooey and wet and fresh and I could even smell that white school glue smell. We all know that smell, don't we?
Then she spoke.
“Look at what I've done to myself.”
She said it with such a smile in her voice, happy, loving. And right there, in my dream, I realized that she did this because she thought I would like it. She blinded herself for me on a whim. I think I screamed.
And then I woke up. I didn't sleep much after that, and since then I try to avoid glitter. I'm fortunate that I don't usually encounter it in everyday life, and I don't tell many people about the dream so nobody's going to prank me or anything. It's such a silly thing, but I just… really hate it.
Still, that's not enough. Every few weeks, I'll find a single piece of green glitter in my house. Always about a sixteenth of an inch square, shiny metallic green, vivid like an emerald. Big enough to notice, small enough to be missed. I've found them on the couch, on the counter, usually on the floor. Once on my shoe - it must have been on my sole, picking it up somewhere when I was running errands. Must have kicked it onto the other shoe's toe when I was taking them off last, right?
I always told myself it's just glitter. It gets everywhere, and it's impossible to get rid of completely, right? Everyone probably finds a piece of glitter sometimes, right? And the green's gotta be a coincidence, right? Green's a nice colour.
That… is, until today. I'm probably being silly. It's just glitter, just a dream. Nothing like that can hurt me, it's just my imagination. Right?
But there's glitter in my bed.

Boring Through by EldritchCyanide

Hello yes happy birthday have a poem that is creppy if you look at it a ways, thank you for being great!

your veins pulse with glitter and the novas in your teeth rattle at the door before they bore inside
when did we become so rickety?
you have holes in your eyes & they lead past your brain & through the universe's corpse-mother
oh, god, did she fear heat death?
you breath out &in&in&in&in
and you shut off the lights because the house was dark long before you came
you rattle at the door before you bore inside and you wonder when you became so rickety
your veins drop glitter in thin shining lines down your wrists
it suspends itself in shimmering, perfect spheres two seconds before it hits the floor
they rattle at the door
you shut off the lights.

And Many More by Decibelles

But really, no need to stick around for us. Live your life and be productive. Happy birthday! :D

Happy birthday, dear friend. I know, I know, I've barely known you for much time, but each life is worth celebrating, is it not? Through all the ups and downs, with family and friends, acquaintances and strangers alike, every little bit is worth celebrating.
I know you've missed out on quite a lot. So let's check everything out together. Oh, sure, sure. There's so much to explore. Ideas of yours, fully realized. Mysteries opened and doors closed. Proteges studying your writing, old friends missing your departure and taking up your helm. Look how much the seeds you've planted have grown! Whole worlds and universes, reproducing and interconnecting… it's grand, isn't it?
Oh, no, no, come on now. I know you're a bit worried. Stage fright, perhaps? Nervousness? Oh. Hrmm. Well, surely you must have expected that you were wanted back? No, you should stay here. I insist. Huh? No, you can't go now. Try? Sure. Go on, take your time.
…
That doesn't go anywhere. You can keep going though. We have time.
…
…
Are you done yet? Good, good. You seem tuckered out already. Let's start catching up on old memories. Welcome back, Doctor.
We have many more birthdays ahead of us.

Kind Of A Stretch by Doctor Cimmerian

Happy Birthday! Hey! I said my first words!

Owl Haiku by Pig_catapult

Happy birthday!

Grainy owl photo
Its eyes gleamed red in the dark
Before it took mine

The Day I Said I Loved You by djkaktus

All the best to you and yours, Gears. Thank you for everything.

The day I said I loved you
you barely looked at me
as you walked away with your friends.
The day I said I loved you
I know you heard the words
because of how your mouth turned down when I spoke them.
The day I said I loved you
I know you were laughing at me
because the laughter cut deeper than any knife.
Except this one.
The day I said I loved you
you didn't lock the door
when you got home and I walked inside.
The day I said I loved you
you took a shower early
so you could get ready for the dance, but you couldn't hear me.
The day I said I loved you
I waited for you in your bedroom
just so I could hear you say it back.
The day I said I loved you
it was behind your face
through your eyes
and with your lips.

Recent Forum Posts by Westrin

Glad to see you're doing well,  Gears. Good luck at life!

Goodbye
Dr Gears 27 Sept 2022, 00:51
in discussion Goodbye

Have a good one, everybody. I'm sad to see it go, but it was a good trip from beginning to end. I will always love each, and every one of your squeals as your innards pour out of your mouth. It gave me a thrill nothing else could.
Now if you excuse me, I'm going to stop the screaming. It's been a while since I fed them.