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"If You Don't Know the Words"
What's your story?

More by this author!

2021

January
Site-87: Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin, United States of America

"So, Baby Bone Wood, you say?"
"No!" Ryan Melbourne's voice on the radio was frantic. "Sloth's Forest, I said! Where the Pit is! I think it's those Neat Freaks, they said they're coming to the Site in three hours!"
"Uh huh." Harold March, commander of MTF Sigma-10 ("The Sloth's Arm"), struck a series of random keys on his keyboard. "Thanks for the report." He paused. "It's 'Leet Phreaks', isn't it?"
"However you say it, they're hackers! They could do a lot of damage if they make it to the server room."
"They won't make it up the hill, Melbourne." March hung up the phone.
"What was that about, sir?" asked Agent Ewell, standing in the doorway of March's office.
"Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all."

"Dr. Jonathan West, author of Pickman's Proposal… because that's not confusing at all…" Wettle nodded at one of the two identical men seated across from him. "Aaaaand… brother."
"Harold. Harold West," the second man muttered.
"Good for you." Wettle narrowed his eyes at Jonathan. "A Proposal, eh? I contributed to an 001 once. It's not published yet, though." He frowned. "Harry's so goddamn slow."
"I don't know who that is," Jonathan shrugged.
"Ha! I'll tell him you said that." Wettle leaned back in his chair. "Harry Blank. Same first name as your brother!"
"Probably a coincidence," said Harold. Dr. Palmer, seated beside Wettle, barely suppressed a smirk.
"Anyway," said Wettle, ignoring them. "You probably know what the shrink and I are up to today."
"He's vetting people," said Harold. "And you're irritating them. Are you an auditor? Because you should know, auditors tend to disappear around here."
"I don't blame them." Wettle glanced at his PDA. "But yeah. Somebody interfered with a secure waitlist on SCiPNET, and we're trying to figure out who. Really we're just killing time; I already know who did it, and I'm gonna tell the MTF commander to arrest him in a few hours."
Palmer blinked. "You're what? You can't still think it was Carracos."
"I can think whatever I want, thanks. What's the competing theory? That it was a pair of legendary hacker geeks? They'll have to show up in the next couple of hours if they want the credit."
Palmer stood up. "I'm going to go talk to Harold about this." He winced. "Harold March, I mean. Sorry."
Harold West shrugged.
"How many Harolds you got here, anyway?" Wettle asked.
"You should've been here back when we had three Baileys," Jonathan remarked.
"Anyway, Palmer, sit down." Wettle waved at the brothers. "March is in meetings for the next two hours or so. Shrink some heads, and maybe your magic 'narrative' will decide to throw us some clues before it's demoted back to D-class for Agent Whatsisface."
Palmer sat down. "Don't invoke the narrative. Or if you do, don't sit so close to me when you do it." He rubbed his temples. "Okay. This isn't ideal, but… it's not healthy to keep things bottled up." He looked at the brothers. "If anything happened to you recently… say, in October, and you want to talk about it, I'm here. I can ask our guest to leave, if you like."
Wettle looked around the room, confused.
Harold puffed out his cheeks. He exhaled. "No, I think he could stand to hear this one."

2020

October

"Evening, John." Tristan Bailey waved as he walked past Harold West's office door.
"HEY. Bailey. Get back here."
Bailey's head appeared around the edge of the doorframe. "What's up?"
Harold pointed at his face. "Who am I?"
"Jonathan West," Bailey responded.
Harold huffed. "How long have we worked together, Tristan? And how often have I called you Trevor? Or Tom?"
Bailey stared at him. "The difference is," he said, slowly, "those are my brothers' names. Tristan is my name."
Harold suddenly felt like undoing his tie. "And Jonathan West is my brother."
Bailey laughed. "He's a brother to us all." His head disappeared back into the hall.
Harold picked up the stack of mail on his desk. It was all addressed to "Dr. Jonathan West." He fought the urge to throw it in the wastebasket, and instead attacked his computer's keyboard with gusto. CLACK CLACK CLACK. He knew his SCiPNET login by heart, so he could really put some anger into the keystrokes. CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK. The RETURN key was especially satisfying.
"User Unknown," the system reported cheerfully.
A strange lightheadedness came over him as he typed the username and password in again, more slowly, less certainly. Clack clack clack clack.
"User Unknown."
He stood up from his desk, scooped up the mail and walked out into the hallway. He glanced at the nameplate on his door — "Dr. Harold West" — and nodded stupidly at it, then headed for his brother's office. He was going to get this sorted out, and fast.
He rounded a corner and spotted Dr. Margaret Reese, who'd been trapped in an endless cycle of ineffectual mutual flirting with his brother for about a decade. He called out to her. "Hey!"
She turned around, and grinned. "Hey, John! Long time, no see!"

2021

January

"She did NOT," said Jonathan.
"I mean, it wasn't really her," Harold muttered. "It was the entity." He shook his head. "It's not like I'm jealous. People get us mixed up, but…"
"Jesus," said Jonathan.
"Boring," Wettle announced. They both glanced at him. He pointed at Jonathan. "Do better."
Jonathan frowned. "How about some ineffectual mutual flirting, then?"

2020

October

"I love this holiday." Dr. Jonathan West looked mournfully up at the S&C Plastics building, which was uncharacteristically un-toilet papered, then at the card reader, which was uncharacteristically unsmeared with egg. He swiped his ID, pulled open the door, and sighed. "Fuck you, COVID."
There were decorations in the lobby, but less than usual. There were precious few costumed coworkers. There were absolutely no bowls of candy. It was depressing… or, it would have been, if he didn't have a plastic bag of pure joy slung under his arm.
He made his way into the office block, whistling "This is Halloween" under his breath. Today was the first day of the rest of their lives.
He knocked on the door to Margaret Reese's office. "Come in," she called out. "It's unlocked."
He opened the door. She was sitting behind her desk, breathing deep from an aromatherapy device; she raised an eyebrow when she saw him, and raised the other when he dropped the bag over her blotter. It was branded: "The Witch's Hut."
"Matching costumes!" he announced.
She looked confused. "What?"
"Matching costumes," he repeated, less confidently. "For the Halloween party?"
She frowned. "…Harold, right? Harold West? What's this about?"

2021

January

"You're making that up," said Harold.
"Hand to god, I'm not," said Jonathan.
"Well Christ, if that's your biggest fear, you need to talk to her. Today."
"Enh. Maybe next Halloween."
Wettle glanced at Palmer's notebook — the man had written Inadequacy and Rejection over the course of the two short stories — and stood up. "I need to piss."

He was washing his hands when Agent Nicholas Ewell walked into the washroom. "How goes Palmer's investigation?"
Wettle dried his hands on Ewell's uniform.
"Hey, what the fuck?"
"It's not PALMER's investigation," said Wettle. "It's MY investigation. I'm in charge."
Ewell was turning yellow again. "What's your deal, buddy?"
"You mean what's my STORY?" Wettle's hands balled into fists. "Everybody thinks I'm the joke researcher. Everybody thinks this is the joke Site. A natural fit, am I right? Send Dr. William W. Wettle, walking comic relief, on a lighthearted adventure to the weird Midwest. What could be funnier?"
"I don't think you're very funny," said Ewell, who was now the colour of… well.
"Why are you…" said Wettle. He frowned. "How badly do you need to pi—"
"That's not what it is. Think of it as an anger management problem." Ewell pushed past him, and opened a stall door. He glanced over his shoulder. "People aren't jokes, Dr. Wettle. People have, people are, stories. If you don't like yours, think up a better one."
Wettle stared at the closed stall door for a few seconds before heading back to Palmer's office.

The late afternoon stretched seemingly to infinity as they ran down the names on Palmer's list. The fear entity had tried to convince Dr. Laslow from Pataphysics that she'd been living in a work of fiction all along; she'd argued it to a draw by pointing out the insignificant distinction between a life lived by narrative rules and a live lived within an actual narrative. It had abandoned her in disgust, and she hadn't bothered seeking counselling because she'd found the incident more amusing than upsetting.
The woman responsible for the Site's cover story, a researcher with the unlikely name of Dr. Sevens, had been convinced that the cover story was real; she was working at a plastics company, she'd dreamed up the entirety of the SCP Foundation on her own, and she was, of course, irrecoverably insane. Wettle thought that one was pretty funny. He didn't even hear Dr. Harrison's story; he was too preoccupied with the man's assertion that he worked in something called the Department of Gastronomy. Wettle was starting to wonder if he was imagining Site-87 himself. He was also starting to get hungry again.
Finally, a researcher named Harold Breaker explained his nightmare, which had involved the entire Site throwing him a retirement party without his having decided to retire beforehand. Wettle interrupted him constantly to talk about his best friend, who was also named Harold, and about Harold March, and about Harold West, and about the unlikelihood of meeting four Harolds over the course of one's life, until Breaker got fed up and left. Palmer had written one word in his notebook during Breaker's interview, as he had for each prior subject. This time the word was Purposelessness. Wettle told him he didn't think that was a word; Palmer told him to mind his own business.

Palmer was now walking away from Wettle after each session, and Wettle obtusely followed him, so they ended up in all sorts of random places in between. This time it was the Site's small library, where the red-haired pirate woman and the dark-skinned man with the dreadlocks were engaged in feverish, hushed conversation next to an ostentatious hardwood bookshelf. They were examining a thick, leather-backed grimoire: We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us: A Guide to Disposing of Unwanted Strangers by Charles Addams. A few other researchers were tapping away on laptops or tablets as they examined less peculiarly on-point tomes.
"It's a good thing you're so shit at your job," Wettle told Palmer's retreating back. "Or we'd never have exposed how many screwed up weirdos you're hiding here."
Palmer stopped in the middle of the room. He turned around to say something.
"Hey," said one of the sundry researchers, a gaunt man with Coke bottle glasses, before Palmer could work his clenched teeth apart. "You might want to try being less antagonistic. Don't you know what happens to antagonists? In stories?"
"This isn't a story," Wettle snapped.
"Well, lay off Dr. Palmer anyway," said a small, blonde-haired woman sitting beside the man with the glasses. "He does good work, and we don't always make it easy for him."
"This is turning into one of those episodes of Star Trek," Wettle grumbled. "Someone with perfectly valid concerns shows up on the Enterprise, and all the too-perfect assholes get their backs up right away and act like he's an axe murderer."
"We know an axe murderer," said a man with dishevelled blonde hair. He was sitting alone at a table in the back of the room, underlining passages in a dog-eared issue of the National Enquirer. "He's a lot nicer than you."
"I'm not here to be nice," Wettle fumed. "I'm here to clean up your mess!"
"Jeez," said the blonde woman. "I thought Canadians were supposed to be polite."
"Well, they're not!" Wettle shouted. "And I'm not Canadian, I only work there! I'm from Illinois."
"Oh, shit," said the blonde man. "Of course you are."

Palmer "offered" to conduct the rest of the interviews himself, and Wettle readily acceded. He shouldered his backpack, took the nearest elevator up as far as it would go, and walked out onto the roof. There was already someone there, and Wettle's first instinct was to push him off. His second instinct was to get back in the elevator. His third instinct, which he usually went with, was to walk over and see what the man was doing.
The man was staring at a Gamblers Anonymous chip held in the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He was holding it over the edge of the roof. He glanced at Wettle. "You're the new guy, huh."
Wettle pulled a packet of cigarettes from his labcoat. "I'm in my fifties."
The other man snorted. "Whole wide roof, and you're gonna smoke right next to me?"
Wettle put the cigarette in his mouth. "I don't smoke anymore. I just like to suck on them."
The man rose magnificently to the challenge of not exploiting that phraseology.
"Come here often?" Wettle asked.
The man shrugged. "Not a bad place for thinking. Clichéd, but not bad." He paused for a moment. "Closest thing to the Pit I've got when I'm on duty."
"The Pit? There's an actual pit?"
"Of course." The man pointed with his free hand. "Out in Sloth's Forest. Unless you know the trick, you can only find it once. I know the trick." He looked satisfied, just for a second. "It's completely bottomless; great for abyss-gazing. And if you stand on the steps of Sloth's Manor, the only thing left from when the Pit swallowed it, you can see your greatest fear."
Wettle burped. It tasted like turkey. "What do you see?"
"I see myself, doing this, every day." The man pocketed the chip, and offered his hand to Wettle. "Ryan Melbourne, memetics."
Wettle ignored the hand. "William Wettle, replication studies."
Melbourne whistled. "Replication, huh? You do stuff other people have already done?"
Wettle nodded, aware that the end of the cigarette was getting soggy. "Yep. It's important work. Nobody else wants to do it."
"You're a secondary character, then." Melbourne stuck his hand in his pocket. "I feel that. It's been years since I got to do anything unique. Since I felt like I had my own story."
Wettle chomped off the end of the cigarette, and it fell to the gravel. "What is it with you people and stories?" He spat the end of the cigarette off the roof.
"Stories create possibilities. Possibilities create hope." Melbourne looked over the snowy forest. "Hope, though, is a fucker. Always lets you down. Rejection after rejection."
"You're a reject?" Wettle smiled.
"Once and future," Melbourne agreed. "Why, just last week I got rejected by SCiPNET itself. I tried to sign up on the waitlist for SCP-5109; you probably don't know what that is, but it's a pretty big deal in memetics circles. Thought I had a real chance of getting to work with it, but apparently the system lost my application. No record of it. Not even an email." There was real anger in his eyes. "Maybe Sloth Spit thought it would be funny. Ryan Melbourne, joke character."
Wettle stared at him. "YOU applied for the password? And the application disappeared?"
Melbourne nodded. "Yeah, stupid right? But that's hope for you."
"I need to make a call." Wettle pulled his PDA out of his labcoat, and started searching for Harold March's number.
"I hope you're not calling the MTF," said Melbourne.
"I am. Why?"
Melbourne was pointing over the edge of the roof again. "Because they're fighting the Leet Phreaks in the parking lot."

"You rang?" one of the black-haired women shouted, hands on her red-spandexed hips, grinning widely.
"Identify yourselves!" shouted Harold March, as three members of MTF Sigma-10 trained their rifles on the absurd duo. They were wearing matching jumpsuits, red and yellow, covered in what looked like lines of circuitry and LEDs. All manner of electronic gizmos were hanging from their belts, and both of their left eyes were covered with cybernetic implants glowing the same colours as their suits.
"Hold that thought!" the woman in yellow bellowed. She pressed a button on the iPod Classic attached to her wrist, and invisible speakers began belting a tune.
♪ Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring; banana phone! ♪
"…I thought we agreed on "867-5309/Jenny,"" she hissed.
"I forgot the number," the woman in red hissed back. "That song's impossible to Google if you forget the number!"
"What the hell is happening?" Ewell asked.
"We want William Wettle!" the woman in yellow roared, pulling an old Nokia cellphone from her belt and brandishing it at the agents.
"We know he's in there!" the other said, tapping buttons on a Game Boy stuck under her own belt. "Give him up!"
"This isn't happening," said Ruby Williams.
"These jokers rate Legend status?" her brother agreed. "Is the nexus trying to compensate for how rough October was?"
March turned to Ewell. "Are we patched through to Wettle's ear transmitter?"
Ewell nodded. "He's hearing every word."
"Good." March cleared his throat. "So! You're the ones who hacked into SCiPNET! Why?"
"To distract you!" The woman in red seemed to be enjoying herself immensely. "We needed more time to prepare our nefarious plan: to hack every phone in Sloth's Pit! You stopped us at the telecom offices, but we know you've got the whole town network tapped. We're gonna make sure everyone knows the name of… the Leet Phreaks!"
They struck a pose, back to back.
March rolled his eyes. "Agents, prepare to fire."

The elevator was heading down, and Wettle was having a panic attack. What's my story? What's my story? WHAT'S MY STORY?
As if someone was putting ideas in his head, he suddenly saw Palmer's notebook as clearly as if he'd held it in his… palm. He saw the words the man had written, one after the other.
Insecurity. He'd known from the start that this place was going to try to make a fool out of him. He'd known from the start that these idiots wouldn't appreciate his brilliance.
Inadequacy. He was the only member of his provisional task force who wasn't the head of a Section or a Site. After eighteen years, he was no better off than he'd been when he'd first transferred to Site-43. Seniority counted for nothing at the Foundation, apparently; the only reason he hadn't been fired and amnesticized, he was certain, was his annual timeline correction duty.
Rejection. He'd arrived at Sloth's Pit to teach the benighted Wisconsinites how to fix their shit, and now they almost universally despised him. They were dealing with the problem he'd been sent to deal with, completely without his input.
Purposelessness Uselessness. He'd never been chosen to author an SCP file. His contributions to that upcoming 001 had been thrown out. His every suggestion in the alternate timelines, crisis situations all, had been ignored. He'd been waiting, arms outstretched, for success to come to him, and it never had. It wasn't fair.
"Not my sloths," he muttered, "not my pit! Not my problem…"
He gasped. He slapped his forehead. He threw off the straps of the backpack, and ripped the zipper open. "This is only for emergencies," Sokolsky had said. "When the shit hits the fan, it'll tell you everything you need to know."
The bag was full of styrofoam packing pellets. He tried digging through them; he gave up, and dumped the entire mess on the elevator floor. The last thing to fall out was a sealed envelope in a plastic baggie.
He fell to his knees, yanked the baggie out of the pile of pellets, and tore it in half. He pulled the envelope apart with his teeth. He read the simple note contained inside.
DON'T FUCK UP, was all it said.
What's my story?
In an instant, he saw it. He saw his every word and action since stepping into Ewell's car in a new light. He saw where this narrative was headed, saw the development it was grinding inexorably towards. He saw the point Sokolsky had been trying to make by sending him here.
He took a deep breath, fixed it all in his mind, and rejected it with extreme prejudice.
"Fuck you," he said. "I'm awesome. That's my story."
The elevator doors slid open.
"And I'm sticking to it."

It was pandemonium in the parking lot. The woman in red gestured at the Agents Williams, and their radios exploded in a burst of static. They fell to the ground, stunned. March and Ewell took aim at her, and the woman in yellow threw back her arms and screamed. Wettle recognized the sound; it was a 56K baud modem screech. It flattened both agents, and they writhed on the tarmac clutching their ears.
Hey, dial it back a notch! Wettle thought. He squelched the impulse to actually say it. "Hey!" he yelled instead. "Quit it!"
The women turned to face him. "You're too late," said the one in red. "Even you can't stop us now."
He puffed out his chest. "Like fuck I can't. I'm Dr. William Wallace Wettle, and…" I've got access to the combined knowl— "… and today is all about ME. I'm smarter than both of you combined." The air was electric. He could feel the narrative straining against him.
The woman in yellow laughed. "Even your… uh… impressive intellect can't stop us now! We'll be wriggling around in your series of tubes within the hour."
The woman in red side-eyed her. "That's more of an internet thing," she whispered. "We're doing a modem theme?"
"I don't know from modems," the woman in yellow whispered back. "I'm from the nineteen-goddamn-hundreds! I only knew how to do that screech because you showed me that vid—"
"HEY." Wettle waved his arms. "Main character over here. You think all this fuss is gonna make people believe in you? Guess fucking what, it won't. Nobody believes in anybody but themselves, and it doesn't matter how great you are, most people just won't get it." He took out a cigarette, and stuffed the end in his mouth. It fell out the moment he started talking again. "You make me sick. You turn into what people think you are! Well, everybody thinks I'm a joke, but fuck them. I'm the one who's laughing. I've gotten eighteen years' salary, room and board, and I haven't had to do jack-squat to earn it. Joke's on them."
The women traded uneasy glances. "This isn't what h—" the one in red whispered to the one in yellow.
"You want someone to spin you a story? You want to be stuck on what other people think of you? Fine, try this on for size." It came to him then, the perfect lie, and he grinned from ear to ear. "There are no Leet Phreaks. There was no SCiPNET hack." He put his hands on his hips, spread his legs apart, and let his labcoat billow in the sudden wind he knew, he knew would be there. (It wasn't.)
"I'm gonna tell everyone that this was just a trick to get people with problems to see their psychiatrist."
Their jaws dropped in sync.
"The end," he said. He ground the cigarette into the tarmac. When he looked up…
…they were gone.
"Oh," he said. "That was abrupt." He looked down at March. "You saw that, though, right?" He tapped his chest. "That was me."
As the agents groggily staggered to their feet, Wettle looked around the parking lot. "Anybody land on a security clearance card, by the way?"

Dr. Palmer eased open the door to the Black Garden pub, careful not to set off the bell. There they were, just as he'd known they would be: two black-haired women in garish jumpsuits, sipping tankards of mead and laughing. Their cybernetic eyes were sitting on the bar in front of them; the cantrips which had made them glow were already beginning to fade.
The bar was nearly deserted, social distancing being what it was, but still one hopeful idiot swayed his way over to them, salacious hope on his face. The paler of the two women, the one in yellow, snapped her teeth at him and growled; without knowing why, the man recoiled and went back to his table.
Palmer sidled up beside them. "Evening, telephonies. Whose idea was this?"
"The Director's," said Katherine Sinclair, researcher and thaumaturge. Her black wig sat cockeyed on her head, and strands of shocking red peeked out from under it. "March was getting antsy about sitting on a Site full of trauma cases, and he was threatening inquests. This was the compromise."
Palmer scoffed. "You ran that farce past a Site Director?"
Sinclair smiled sheepishly. "Well… the vague outline, maybe. We might have stretched our remit just a teensy little bit, with the Phreaks. The costumes, and the dialogue…"
"And the inviting an anomaly to your parking lot," Sinning Jessie added. Palmer started at the gaping, bloody hole where her left eye should have been.
"Yeah, and that. I'm probably in some terrific shit, but it was worth it." Sinclair adjusted the black patch over her own left eye. "I wonder if Monty would like me as a brunette."
"The other Legends aren't gonna talk to me for a week," Jessie grinned.
"And the other Sites will just shake their collective heads, because to them this is just business as usual in Sloth's Pit." Palmer shook his head. "You could've at least tried to match the local tone. This was more like… the theme park version of Nexus-18."
"Nah." Sinclair shook her head, and the wig rolled back precariously. "If we didn't go full-on ridiculous, we stood a good chance of accidentally creating real thoughtforms. Nobody in their right mind would actually believe in the Leet Phreaks; that's why we had 43 send their most wrongheaded man."
She noticed Palmer's expression, and looked contrite. "Yeah, I know, sorry. We were gonna let you in on it, but we figured… you know. Ethics."
He nodded, slowly. "You killed Melbourne's password request, pretended a GoI mole did it, and gave us a list of the people who haven't sought counselling since October to interview." He grimaced. "You compelled those people to talk to me. I'd never have agreed to it."
"But it worked, right?" Jessie grinned, raising her tankard to her rosy red lips. "You got just about everybody."
"I've got followup sessions scheduled for everyone except Ryan Melbourne, yes." He shook his head. "I think you might have given a few of them new problems, though."
Now Sinclair looked guilty. "Remind me to do something nice for Carracos."
He was only half-listening. "You know, the moment they said these new thoughtforms had cybernetic left eyes, I should've known it was you two."
Sinclair hiccoughed. "Yeah, we fooled you all but good. A little thaumaturgy from me, some banshee screams from Jess, great theatre." She cradled her tankard. "We put in a show at the phone company for the Sloth's Arm, made sure they got a good look. They told Wettle, and hey presto! What an idiot."
Palmer signalled the bartender; he'd have what they were having. "Why was it even necessary, though? Did he need to defeat a villain?"
"Absolutely." Jessie tossed her hair; unlike Sinclair, she wasn't wearing a wig. "That's how the narrative works. You can't just swoop in to Sloth's Pit, unwittingly help a bunch of people get psychological help, then swoop out without a climax. He had to either defeat a villain, or solve a mystery."
"And he isn't the mystery-solving type." Sinclair grinned. "The narrative was the real GoI. If Wettle didn't get some character development, if he didn't get a satisfying conclusion, something disastrous would have happened. The plan wouldn't have worked. The nexus doesn't like being upstaged, and straight up hates it when you ignore the rules."
Palmer frowned. "Except you did upstage it, and I don't think he had any character development at all. Did you hear the things he was saying? I think he's just as vapid and insecure as he was when he got here. If I read Pickman's Proposal right, this should be a very unsatisfying ending indeed. He didn't learn a lesson, or get his comeuppance."
Sinclair looked uneasy. "Well… he's gone now, right? So it's too late for things to go pear-shaped. All's well that ends well?"
Palmer shook his head. "He's not gone. He's taking a package back to 43, and it's not ready yet, so he's gone for a walk in the woods. Melbourne told him about the Pit, and he decided to take a look."
Jessie buried her face in her mug. Sinclair pulled off her wig, and considered it thoughtfully.
"Well," she said finally. "Shit."

He wasn't sure what he was going to do when he found the Pit. He wasn't at all sure that he wanted to know what his greatest fear was. After the day he'd had, he very much felt like commandeering a car, driving back to Site-43, and telling Daniil Sokolsky just where he could stick his nasty note. But something had drawn him out here, and…
"Fuck," he muttered. "Got me after all."
The finale had left him rather cold, admittedly. He'd gotten to tell someone off, which was nice. He'd gotten his ego stroked, which was nicer. But there was something he hadn't gotten to do, something he was certain everyone else had gotten to do on their missions, and he hated the unfairness of it all.
"I didn't get to say the password."
A thought occurred to him, then, like an almost inaudible voice on the wind. You should say it. Just once. It had to be his overactive imagination; it was nothing like the gentle string-tugging of the narrative, back at the parking lot.
He shook his head. "It's too dangerous. If anyone hears me…"
Who's going to hear you, out here? the voice in his head insisted.
He was standing in an empty forest clearing. He'd lost track of how far he'd walked, or how long he'd been walking for. He'd probably stumble on the Pit at any moment. But the voice, his internal monologue, was right; there was no-one around. What could it hurt?
He opened his mouth and quietly, gleefully, recited SCP-5109 to the still evening air.
"Thanks," the voice said, much louder. As his thoughts tumbled into the empty space which had suddenly opened up in his mind, like a tongue worrying the gap left behind by an extracted tooth, as the panic began to take hold again, a happy humming faded into the deep woods ambience.

Not My Sloths, Not My Pit

The Time After Time Password

The Green Machine


Written by Harmony

▸ More by this Author ◂

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F.A.Q.

{$doesthisfixthebug}

“So going through it, then?”
“You make it sound like it's going to be such an ordeal.”
“You're not answering me.”
“… Yes. I've thought about it for a long time, but now's the time. I've done so much for so long… this might be my last shot to make up time with everyone.”
“Are you taking your pills?”
I'm feeling confused. “What?”
There were coffee stains on the front of the lab coat. But what manners! Everyone here was so friendly and kind. The Foundation told me that they would ensure I only ever have a good doctor.
He's pulling a blank white pill bottle out of his lab coat pocket. “I know on your chart you indicated that you did not consent to supplementaries. That does not mean they're not available for you, if you change your mind later. I know it's a lot right now to be adding another thing to the mix, but it's here if you need me to write something up for you.”
I'm shaking my head, looking down at her reflection in the tea. “No… I want this to be real. Sometimes, when I'm on those things, I dissociate and the rooms look like a crummy sepia-toned TV.”
My doctor is shrugging, and pocketing the pills again. “Well, don't forget about it. These things have a way of sneaking up in ways that can have unforeseen consequences.”
Unforeseen.
“Thank you. Well, I have to go… I think they're going to be tired of waiting for me. I'm actually already supposed to be loaded in the chamber”
I'm getting a hug. “Good luck. Say hi to Vinny for me if you see him, would ya? He'll be the poor sap stuck up in the booth. He hates it up there, but that's the only place he can work.”
I'm smiling. “I will.”
Two Decades Ago

VOICE MAIL TRANSCRIPT
00:00: DIAL TONE
01:16: (MUFFLED)?
01:19: (HUMAN MALE BEGINS SPEAKING. AUDIO QUALITY INCOMPREHENSIBLE)
01:30: (MUFFLED)-ABLE. IF YOU[]ANT TO[]E ME, IF Y[]ILL SHOW[]ELF, I'LL BE ON THE OTHER SIDE. BEYOND THE D[].
01:45: (STATIC)ROKEN D[]BUT I CAN WAIT. THIS WILL A[]SO[].
</END TRANSCRIPT\>

Two Days Ago
Dr. Zakarov escorted me to the lunch counter.
“Everyone's been walking on sunshine since I told them.”
I shrugged. “I'm not really interested in fanfare.”
Her thoughts were interrupted by a pounding at the door.

Who could that be?

“Hey, are you in there? You need to call back. It's time to clock in.”
I knew she should know. But she didn't. She groped around in her head for the memory, which had slipped through her fingertips and spiraled down a grate of omission.
She stared at the door.
Somebody was pounding on it.
Hesitating. “I… I don't know who you are! Don't come in.”
“Don't know me? I'm-” the sound of the voice dipped, and she moaned. She could hear a heavy shoulder leaning on the door. “I'm sorry, that's rough.”
“Who are you?”
“I'm sorry.”
The weight lifted. Standing, hesitating, standing, looking to the other side, the moldy carpet squishing under my feet.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“I'm ready to listen… if you can tell me who you are. I should know. I'm sorry. But I don't.”

Hand hovering above the brass doorknob, and then grasped it. It was damp and warm to the touch, like it had been in her hand for a long, long time. I'm twisting it, and pulling it over the threshold.

I wasn't in my mind, but a small apartment, almost like a hotel room. All of the furniture covered in sheets, with drapes over the windows and a shag carpet.
At least it wasn't rotten.
I closed the door behind her, and stepped forward into the room. “Hello?”
A voice called something out from another room. Muffled, but unmistakable. “Ready?”
I take two more steps, I'm resting her hand on a sheet-covered armchair. My eyes look back to where the door was before. Something muffled happened, but there was no vocal response.

Zakarov is looking at me, and smiling, and I'm smiling too.


Any additional comments (image sources, crit credits, whatever)

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F.A.Q.

{$doesthisfixthebug}

Of the air across another Planet, and nestled between the darkness of earth and beast, had laid the Lovers. The two had been across the towers of the northern wastes. Lost in each other's shadow and withered heart.

They had stood tall, and sullen.
Across the darkness of the woods and valley, The Lovers had attempted to cross
Steps had been taken with slow and precision- like the delicate steps of a wind-up March Hare.
They walk across the uneven and muddy slopes, malborges-
One leg across, other following suit, each supporting the other, in front, and back
And back
Back again
Back
To the East of the River, had laid chasm
And how would Lovers across such a thing?
Her arms and his Legs
Stumbled across the edge and-
HIs legs had scarcely ran across the river cerulean
Her arms following suit, gripping the wounded rope, held tight like her tender, wounded heart.
And yet, as she had near fallen, and him near stumbled, they had come across as dawn and abyssal remains gentlly faded

Across a path now, The Lovers soon had begun to fight, and shove
Such Trivial things!
But he had shoved, and she had whipped back
As the dark of sold night came across, faster and faster now, The Lovers had become separated
One could not have known if it had been the uneven ground
Or the quarrel.
Yet she had fell off of him, and in his panic, had run.
As Fate would have it, another bridge had come across.
This had been long and narrow, with rope across the sides, leading onto the narrow not of before.
And he could not across
For no arm to oft,
She had been thrown off, hadn't she?
And such cruel similar fate had across Her as well
For shan't she across without legs of her own?
The two had laid dead, without each other.
In the Darkness of Earth and Beast. A wolf howls.

I am filled with upmost loathing and sullity. Let the old men keel them away. Better to rot alone then to fall apart together.


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"Not My Sloths, Not My Pit"
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2021

January
Site-87: Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin, United States of America

"Ryan, you know you can beat this."
"Bet?"
"No." Merrick Palmer leaned forward. "No, I am not going to bet that you can beat your gambling addiction."
Ryan Melbourne shifted on the couch. "You'd deny a man his last cigarette, huh."
Palmer nodded. "Yes, I'm definitely a doctor against lung cancer."
"You know what I meant." Melbourne sat up. "And you know what I mean. What's the point? Why should I bother? I keep trying to be better, day after day, and the world keeps trying to make things worse." He fiddled with his Gamblers Anonymous chip.
Palmer made a note: Fatalism. "What makes you say that?"
Melbourne laughed. "Come on, doc. Isn't seeing patterns your whole job? And mine, too, kinda. Memetics is all about patterns, and here's the one I see: the minute I stand on my own two feet, dear old nexus pulls the rug out from under me. You can't say it's all in my head. Not with a straight face."
Palmer raised one eyebrow. "You've never tried me at poker."
"True." Melbourne stood up, and stretched. "But you know I'm game."

The day hadn't started well for Dr. William Wettle. He'd been pulled out of bed — literally — far earlier in the afternoon than he was used to. He'd been patronized by the All-Sections Chief, who had laboriously explained the nature of Sloth's Pit: an unseen but powerful force manipulated events within Nexus-18, crafting a cohesive and satisfying "narrative" out of the events occurring therein. This narrative was an entity, intangible but omnipresent, always to be reckoned with carefully. He was warned at length against "tempting fate" and "antagonistic behaviour," and briefed on the practical applications of "deux ex machina." He was lectured about literary theory. He ignored almost every word.
Then he'd been patronized by Sokolsky, who had given him a backpack, told him it was only to be opened during an emergency, and set him waiting outside the Site like a child waiting for a schoolbus. Worst of all, he now faced an interminable car ride with an amiable Foundation agent. He felt like the butt of a joke he didn't quite get, and he was torn: should he sulk, or should he fume?
Agent Nicholas Ewell's first question settled the matter. "What's your story?" he asked, with a knowing smile. Wettle hated knowing smiles, so he scowled and said flatly, "I don't do stories."
Ewell grinned. "Well, you're headed to the wrong place."
Two hours in the car with Wettle made Ewell much less amiable. The trouble started with some bad news: nobody at Site-87 knew who had requisitioned the password, and so they had no idea what Group of Interest was involved. "You're going to have to do some detective work," Ewell remarked.
Wettle hadn't intended to do any work. He'd intended to pass along the password, then palm off the rest of his duties on the security staff. This worsened his already glum mood, and he spent the rest of the ride complaining about anything that came in range of his dull senses. By the time they crossed the town limits, Ewell's mouth was set in a thin line and his skin had taken on an unhealthy yellowish hue. "Carsick," he said.
A welcome sign swung past on the driver's side. Wettle didn't have time to parse the visuals, but the motto stuck with him: "Stories Create Possibilities." He'd be mulling that over for the next few hours. If he'd been clever, he'd have gotten the in-joke.
If he'd been cleverer, he'd have been shocked at its audacity.
The land rose up in front of them as they drove along Plastics Circle, and Wettle examined the four-storey brown rectangle which perched like a voxel vulture atop the hill. There was an unlit neon sign on the building, big and bold: "S&C Plastics — It's Fantastic!"
"Why?" Wettle whined. "I hate that song."
"That's why. It said something different when I left." Ewell shrugged. "Welcome to Sloth's Pit."
There was a red-haired woman with an eyepatch and a portly, dark-skinned man with dreadlocks standing on the lawn beside the building. They were tracing thaumaturgical symbols on the grass around a colourful, persistent series of starbursts in the rough shape of a man.
"Happy New Year," said Ewell. "You should see what happens on the Fourth of July."
Wettle switched smoothly to sulking. "This place is already giving me a headache," he moaned. "That's not supposed to happen in real life, is it?"
"This isn't real life." Ewell pulled the car into an empty space in the parking lot. "This is Wisconsin."

Wettle's contact was alone in his office. He looked like a thinner Dr. Phil with a kind of Einstein haircut, and a fuzzy sweatervest under his labcoat. He stood up when Wettle entered, and smiled encouragingly.
"Merrick Palmer. Site psychologist." He extended a hand from behind the desk.
Wettle scoffed. "Must be run off your feet, around here."
Palmer narrowed his eyes, lowered his hand, and nodded. "Yes, we've had some traumatic events recently."
Wettle shook his head. "That's not what I meant."
"I realize that. I was trying to move past it." Palmer frowned. "You seem… irritable. What's your story?"
"I didn't come here to tell stories, I came here to work." This wasn't precisely true, but he said it loud, so he expected Palmer to believe it. "Somebody faked up an application to use the password, and you people don't even know who did it. Why is that? Got a whole Site full of potential moles, do you? Sounds like bad management to me."
Palmer's genteel front solidified. It had been apparently genuine when Wettle had entered the room, but he now needed to shore it up manually to maintain decorum. "That's not fair. It hasn't been a great few months, because of the fear entity attacks last October. Everyone suffered differently, and everyone handles suffering differently. The only throughline is that trauma takes time to heal."
Wettle sat down, without asking. His backpack squished against the chair. "Whatever. I'm not going back until I know who wanted the password, or I'll like look an asshole in front of everybody. So, you and I need to interview suspects."
Palmer's eyes narrowed further. "I'm not about to break confidentiality, and I don't much like thinking of my co-workers or patients as 'suspects'." He sat down as well.
Wettle waved the objections off. "Please. You work for the Foundation, your professional ethics are flexible. All I need is help sorting the crazies from the liars."
Palmer tented his fingers. "If you use that word again, I wouldn't work with you even under direct O5 orders."
Wettle shrugged. "A psychologist who thinks 'liar' is a bad word, huh?" He took his PDA out of his labcoat pocket. "Well, let's get started. Unless you want to see if I can get O5 on the line, to test your big brag."
Palmer sighed. "Fine." He slid a printout across the desk. "The Director is going to announce that we're doing interviews to figure out who hacked into SCiPNET, omitting any mention of the password. We'll start with the names on this list."
Wettle glanced down his nose at it. "You've already got a list? I thought I was gonna have to do the heavy lifting."
Palmer did the only diplomatic thing he could do; he kept his mouth shut.

Agent Alexander Carracos shifted nervously on his bunk. "Did I do something wrong?"
"You tell me," said Wettle, with a nasty smile. He was sitting side-saddle on a plastic chair which faced away from Carracos; he'd tried to straddle it, like he'd seen in the movies, only to find that his legs wouldn't open that far. He was too proud to admit defeat, and anyway it was still easier to sit this way without taking off the backpack, so he refused to rotate the chair again.
"You heard the Director," Palmer said cheerfully. He was sitting on an identical chair, the right way around. "Someone covertly accessed SCiPNET, and we're trying to find out who. Checking in on anyone who's been behaving unusually, these past few months." He shifted seamlessly to an expression of concern. "You've been uncharacteristically morose since October, Alexander. Anything you want to get off your chest? You don't have to say anything, I'll remind you."
"Yeah, if you're guilty, you'll want to keep that a secret," Wettle added. Palmer winced.
Carracos looked at each of them in turn, clearly wrestling with some inner dilemma. "I'm not a hacker," he said. "It was probably… maybe it was the Leet Phreaks?"
Wettle blinked, slowly. "The elite what?"
"The Leet Phreaks. New thoughtforms Ruby, Blake and Ray bumped into on patrol last week. Really ridiculous, not the nexus' usual style." He looked hopeful. "Are we done here?"
Palmer smiled kindly. "We're done here when you say we are, Alexander. But if something's bothering you, this is the perfect time to get it out in the open."
Carracos squirmed. He looked at Wettle. He squirmed some more. "You're here because all the other agents have gone for psych counseling since October, and I haven't. You think I have something to hide."
"I think you're upset, and it's eating you up, yes. But if you're not comfortable telling us what happened to you, we can talk later. Or not at all. It's your call."
Carracos blew out a breath, and Wettle jumped in his seat. "You know what? Fine. I don't want to sit on this any longer."

2020

October

He awoke in a strange place. A strange, yet somehow familiar place. The thread count on his bedsheets was wrong. What he was wearing was definitely wrong, because he usually didn't wear much to bed. The mattress was a little too hard, the air a little too stale, and when he opened his eyes and saw the padded walls of the humanoid containment cell he very nearly lost his mind.
"Good morning, Alexander."
He sat bolt upright. There was a man with a labcoat standing at the foot of his utilitarian cot, looking down at him with an expression of benign disinterest.
Carracos took mental stock of his surroundings and resources, which didn't amount to much. He was wearing — no — an orange jumpsuit with no pockets. The containment cell was empty. The doctor had a clipboard, and a pen. Not much to work with. He tossed the thin sheet aside and stood up. "I don't know what you think you're pulling, here, but my unit will already be looking for me. It's in your best interests to tell me what's going on, and then get out of my way." His voice sounded strong, he thought; he hoped the stranger wouldn't detect the slight waver.
The stranger grinned. "Nobody's coming for you, Alexander. We've explained everything to them. Now, let me conduct the intake interview so I can reintegrate you with your… colleagues." He chuckled.
Carracos wiped his brow. "There's been a mistake."
The grin widened. "I should say there has! Do you know, our records had you down as an AGENT?" He chuckled again. "You. An agent. Ridiculous."
The tremble in his voice was obvious, now. "I am an agent. I've been an agent for—"
"Now, I think I've indulged you for long enough. We don't fraternize with the D-class."
Carracos felt faint. He'd recognized all the trappings of the position, of course; he was intimately familiar with them. But it felt like a punch in the gut to hear the man say it out loud. "I'm not D-class. I'm an agent! MTF Sigma-10! That's what your records say, right?"
The man glanced at his clipboard. "Are you denying that you entered this Site as class-D?"
"Of course not, but—"
"Well, even a criminal like yourself knows we don't select our agents from the cannon fodder pool."
"I can prove it!" His heart was racing. "I was on duty when the Black Autumn attacked! When the Pit Sloth attacked! Just ask anyone in my unit, they know me! Ask Director Weiss!"
The stranger scoffed. "I'm not going to bother her with trivialities. But I am impressed with your dedication to this fiction; it'll be a shame to lose someone with such an active imagination. There's such FEAR in you!" Carracos could see the man's gums, now.
"Ask my unit!" He was pleading. "Call them up! It won't take you more than five minutes."
"Come now, D-5474. You're not worth five minutes of a researcher's time. You're just unskilled labour. You live and die by our whims."
"Please," he gasped. It was getting hard to breathe. "Please, I didn't do anything wrong. I got a second chance!" He searched the man's eyes for even the barest hint of compassion. "I got a second chance!"
The doctor's teeth gleamed in the cold fluorescent light. "Well, you won't get a third one."

2021

January

Wettle was staring at him. Palmer was smiling supportively. "Thank you for sharing that with me, Alexander. I'm sorry you had to go through it. If you want to stop by my office later…"
Carracos nodded, blinking away the tears. "Of course. I should've told you earlier, it's just…"
Palmer nodded. "No need to explain."
"Uh," said Wettle. "Yes need to explain. This guy was a D-class?"
"This guy," said Palmer, standing up, "is an agent of MTF Sigma-10, and a recipient of the Foundation Star." He extended a hand to Carracos, who took it for a moment. Palmer smiled a tight, encouraging smile, then picked up his chair and turned to go.
Wettle saw one word written on the doctor's notebook as he passed: Insecurity. He followed him out of the bunkhouse, leaving the chair where it sat.

"It's obviously him."
Palmer shot a look over his shoulder at Wettle as they headed for the barracks common room. "It's obviously not him."
"You promoted a D-class to agent? What kind of shitshow are you people running here?"
There were three more agents sitting around a table in the common room. Palmer gestured at them. "Agents Williams, Williams and February. They're the ones who encountered the Phreaks last week."
"What makes these freaks different from all the other freaks around here?" Wettle asked, heading for the refrigerator. He didn't see everyone else in the room frown at him.
"It's 'Phreaks,' with a 'p'," said Ruby Williams. "We know how dumb it sounds."
"Phreaking is the term for phone hacking," her brother continued. "We caught them at Sloth's Pit Telecom, listening in on people's private conversations, doing god knows what."
"We thought they might be part of the Union, our local Group of Interest of… ah… career-based weirdos?" Ruby picked up smoothly. "But judging by the way they ran, they were up to no good. Probably malicious thoughtforms, trying to raise their profile. There's two of them, twins like Blake and I. Black hair, cybernetic eyes—"
"—jumpsuits with LEDs, and utility belts full of old pagers and cellphones and stuff. I'd have thought it was just some townies playing a prank on us, but they straight up vanished when we pursued. What're you doing?"
Wettle was rooting around in the fridge. He didn't answer the question. "What's a thoughtform?"
"A living legend," said February. "A story come true. Like Chapman-342."
"I'm gonna assume that's an ice cream flavour," said Wettle. He glanced up at the freezer for a moment. "Wait, do you guys have ice cream here?"
"Chapman-342 is Sinning Jessie, a sort of one-eyed, genital-consuming banshee," Palmer explained.
Wettle banged his head on the top of the fridge as his stance tightened reflexively. "What-consuming?"
"We use the Chapman system to denote nexus anomalies," Palmer continued, ignoring him. "Anything of purely local interest and subject to frequent change."
February nodded, though Wettle wasn't looking at him. "Legends in Sloth's Pit are sensitive to alterations in their mythology, and when that mythology fades from the public consciousness entirely, they get carried along with it. Take Chapman-392, the Hum. A disembodied voice in the woods. It never really caught on, and it always had a low profile to begin with. Nobody talks about it, so nobody's seen… heard it, for a long time. It might not even exist anymore. When people stop telling their stories, thoughtforms dissipate."
Blake looked rueful. "But even with the occasional flash-in-the-pan, we've still got a full stock of thoughtforms. They're usually… no, they're never as ridiculous as the Phreaks; I don't know what's going on there. I guess if you get enough identity-stealing robocalls, and some townie writes a creepypasta, this might be the… first draft, of what you get? I'm an agent, not a nexologist. But the town is so weirded up as it is, we could fill the main database to capacity in about a week."
"And then we'd spend all our time fielding calls from Site-19, asking if we were shitposting," Ruby added.
Wettle finally pulled a promising-looking sandwich out of the fridge, and ripped off the cellophane. "Cool, whatever." He took a bite; it was turkey, and it wasn't bad. "So you think an urban legend hacked your computers to get famous, huh?" He started opening the kitchenette cabinets, looking for some salt. "I still think it was Maracas."
That took a moment to register. February spoke up first. "Carracos? Does that mean Carracos? You think he phreaked SCiPNET? Why would he even do that?" The man was positively vibrating by the end of the sentence.
Wettle opened a McDonald's packet of salt onto the turkey, then took another big bite. "He was D-class," he mumbled, through a mouthful of bread and spiced fowl. "He's capable of anything." He swallowed. "Bet you didn't know that. Your incompetent headshrink didn't seem surprised, guess he's been keeping secrets from you all."
February actually stood up at the table, like he was going to walk over and punch Wettle in the face. "We all know where Alejandro comes from," he snapped. "And we all know who he is. You're wrong."
"And we all know Dr. Palmer's got our backs," Ruby added.
"Speaking of which, we never made our followup appointments," said Blake.
"Can we do next Thursday? We've got—" Ruby began.
"—drills in the morning, but the afternoon's free, yeah," Blake agreed.
Wettle dropped the wrapper on the floor and stalked out of the room.
"Jeez, buddy, what's your story?" February called after him.
"I DON'T HAVE A STORY," Wettle shouted from the hallway.
Palmer shrugged apologetically, picked up and binned the wrapper, then headed out to join him.

Ryan Melbourne, memeticist, stood at the edge of the bottomless pit where once had stood Jackson Sloth's manor. He twiddled his Gamblers Anonymous chip between his fingers, and stared into the blackness below. This had once been his go-to example of the all-or-nothing nature of protagonism in Nexus-18: everyone got one chance to stumble upon it, nestled in the heart of Sloth's Forest, and they'd never be able to find it again afterwards. Then narrative convenience had required that rule to be broken, and he'd learned the arcane steps to circumventing it, and he'd started making surreptitious return trips to ponder the nature of life in a living work of fiction.
A faint hum in the air got his attention, and he looked up sharply. The moment passed, but he'd long since learned not to ignore such obvious cues, so he scanned the distant treeline and…
…he froze. There were two figures standing in a copse at the opposite end of the pit, conversing. They had long, black hair. They were wearing garish jumpsuits. And one of each of their eyes, the same eye, shone bright in the gloom.
He heard, very faintly, like whispers on the wind, two ragged scraps of conversation. First, "We do look good." Second, moments later, "…at the Site in three hours."
He backed away slowly, then ran until his breath became laboured, then jogged as best he could the rest of the way back to his car.

Meanwhile, in Australia

The Time After Time Password

If You Don't Know the Words


CompendiumSW 04/25/2016 (Mon) 10:56:30 #4810605

Transcription project entry 21, collected and annotated in Tucson, Arizona, July 5th 2006. Original recording unavailable.

"Something is happening all across the US southwest, and I intend to be far across the country when it gets going. Fifteen or twenty years ain't enough, and you're not gonna be looking like that at me for packing my bags now, once you hear what I have to say. So sit."

The bar was dark, and the man looked less than reputable. I was here recording stories, though, and I didn't have much reason to pass this one up.
"I'll listen," I told him.
He poured himself another drink and took a sip, holding the whiskey in his mouth before swallowing.
"Will it be long?" I asked, and hit pause on the audio app.
He swung one leg out of his chair.

"If you've got places to go, that's-"

"No, no! I'd like to hear your story."
He sighed.

"As long as you don't ask questions 'till the end, I'll tell it. I'm tired of your types getting bored before I can take a fuckin' breath."

"Very well then."
He settled back into his seat, and I unpaused the recording.

"I was a trucker once. I used to do eighteen hour stints down the Interstate 10, not that I have much to show for it."

He chuckled.

"Now this was during in the nineteen-seventies, the job was different back then. No GPS systems when you're lost, mile markers were never maintained, hell, the headlights on my truck barely worked half the time! But my job required straight deliveries gone thousands of miles, so fuck me if I didn't know the place.
Because some nights, something'd go wrong, and I'd have to hole up at the next place in east Jesus nowhere for the night. Nice diners, nicer people, considering the sand in every direction, I got to know a hundred or more of these little towns, by necessity or by choice. Could barely read a map in the cabin, I had to know 'em like the back of my hand. So you can understand I got a little upset when they started to disappear."

The man softly put down his cup, looked to two sides along the bar, and started again.

"Now this isn't aliens or any of that bullcrap, it ain't only lack of opportunities and economic depression neither. No, what I seen was a newly built guardrail and a flat patch of concrete where the little town used to be. The maps stopped printing their names in the newer editions, and I'd doubt if I could find any of 'em on the internet if I were to look. No, no fire, no fuckery, just up and gone. And I think I've seen how it happens."

He leaned back in his chair.

"Now back in the 'seventies, I was out on my own, I was thinking I was losing it, all those miles on the open road. Started repeating names of places to the nearest people who could stand to be around me. All I got were weird looks in response at best, people asking me to leave at worst. The smaller the town, the dingy rest stop or the no-name diner in question, colder the responses seemed to be. Got a sense there was something I wasn't supposed to be knowing.
So I really did think I was losing my mind until I met someone in a bar a lot smaller than this one, a Mexican man by the name of Pablo. I kept some old maps with me by now, try'na argue my point, but Pablo caught one look at a map and froze. Before I even started on a list of names, his finger fell on one in particular. A little town called Yunque, just on the edge between New Mexico and Arizona. He was silent for a moment, 'fore he cursed in seven different ways and said it shouldn't be happening north of the border now. He knew something. He took me out back behind the bar and started talking.
According to Pablo, this wasn't a new thing. It was a rot, he said, an infection that'd take hold in a town when the water started drying up. It first appears in the gutters, he said, before taking hold and pulling the whole town down with it, hitting before anyone could react. He was evasive about what it was, exactly. Said it was called Las Aguas Enegrecidas, and that he knew about it because it had taken his town. Coming up quicker than any could expect, hitting in a year when the taps run dry. He had made it out alive, he said, and he was the only one. Some trucks came by, sprayed the aftermath with something, and drove off, and the town was an empty gravel lot now, last he was concerned.
He asked me what I knew, what I was forgetting, getting more and more intense by the second. I didn't know much, but he insisted I write down the places that'd disappeared, and keep it in a place no one else knew. He'd known somebody in Yunque, and expected this to happen for a long time. You'd have pointed at him and called him crazy, but me? After five years of places I'd known not being places anymore? I believed him. I believed him, and when he offered to take me for a ride, show me one they hadn't gotten to yet, I accepted."

The old man pulled out a map, an old one that looked coffee stained or something, with a dark traced line scored into the paper that lead to somewhere in western Sonora, Mexico. He traced the line again and again with a ballpoint pen while talking.

"It was a long, loong trip. We loaded up into his truck, in the lot outside the building I'd parked my truck in a few days earlier. His was a beat-up Ford, white paint peeling off a dinged-up exterior. We got to going, but when I say something's long as a trucker, it's long. Only a few hundred miles total, but most of those hundreds of miles were on clogged up Mexican highways, unlit country roads at night, and eventually, two-tracked lengths of dirt as far as the eye can see.
We stopped a bit outside nowhere, and parked the truck in the late afternoon sun. We'd reached Fallecido, Mexico, a town of two hundred that had been lost five months ago, and had gone just quietly enough that no one had bothered to check. And, according to Pablo, an opportunity to see what Las Aguas Enegrecidas leaves behind.
We'd just gotten out of the truck when something changed in the wind, and we were hit by the smell. A heavy smell, hanging in the air, it was like wine and turpentine, heady and acrid and nearly alcoholic. We'd smell it whenever the wind changed, for just a moment, before it was gone again.
The second thing I noticed was the great black patch where the town used to be. I wandered inward, past half-sunken fences, toward what looked like a space where the ground could've been gone. The sand sloped just downward, and I stumbled a bit before Pablo caught my hand, steadying me and cussing at me for my stupidity. Look where you're going, he said. Told me he wasn't quite sure five months was long enough, that 'the hole' was barely in eyesight and that we shouldn't go much futher.
As if to explain, he pointed to a crack in the ground, one of the many radiating from that thing a quarter mile off. Pablo got down on one knee, and pointed out what looked like a fern growing up from the crack, but it was black and dark gray. Careful not to touch it, he told me to look closer. There was a spiral to it, like ferns have before they're grown, and in the center of that spiral, the size of a head of a pin, was a milky white eye. The wind changed again, and this time it smelled a little like fish.
I got up, turned, and looked around, before realizing the ground was riddled with the things. Small coiled plants and vines, black and dark grey, with tiny white specks that appeared here and there. This time I didn't look closer. Pablo spent a while considering, and then told me I deserved to see it. That no one else knew, people thought I was crazy, so I deserved to see the center. See what happened to Pablo's town.
We walked onward, but the walking was slow. Pablo would stop and look down. Once Las Aguas Enegrecidas got in you, he said, it never got out, so it'd help to be careful. As we walked futher in I could see his concern. The little plants and vines got closer together, and soon I was crunching 'em under my boot wherever I stepped. They bled a black-blue, and smelled awful. The plants started getting weirder, and where I did see buildings, they were half swallowed up. The ground was spongy now, and once I saw what looked like a desert bush, gnarled and tangled and dyed blueish-black. Little white berries hung from the tips of its branches. Looked closer, and saw they were fish eyes, shiny and perfectly round.
It wasn't long before I realized the black patch I'd seen earlier wasn't the hole. It was a field of dark grass and lichens, a bit obscured by the downward slope. We were clutching each other's shoulders by now; Pablo said he was glad the waters were dead.
I doubted that, exactly, saying I'd seen something moving in the cracks in the ground. It was hard to tell, but we looked, and there was something, deep in those cracks, dark against dark. It moved rhythmically, in and out along its length, and I heard a quiet whooshing sound every time it moved. It was the waters, he said. Still dead, but I was hearing the tides.
The cracks were converging. Pablo had mentioned a hole, and I saw it, sheer rock wall plunging downward, some sixty feet wide. What drew my attention away from that, though was what happened to the people of Fallecido. Bodies. A few dozen of them, dotting the soggy ground to the left and right of us, all up on their backs. It was hard to tell, because they were stained blue and black and sunk partways into the ground, but they seemed more preserved than what five months would do to you.
All of them, heads roughly facing the hole in the ground, with what looked like barnacles covering their faces till no skin could be seen. Their arms were gone.
I stepped a bit over them, more than a little sick to my stomach. I nodded at Pablo, and he just nodded back. As stricken as I was. It wasn't just the bodies that was making me nauseous, it was the smell- over here it was overpowering. Dark and salty and chemical and it practically billowed up from the edge of the hole, washing over our faces in waves. We walked forward.
Standing at the edge of the hole was dizzying. Not only because of vertigo, the ground was sloped like a funnel here, crawling with cracks and black plants. We were holding our noses, but the smell just came in through the mouth instead. The hole was deep, irregular in shape, and it was filled with dark water.
The water, like Pablo had said, was dead. Stagnant, so blue it was black, with a film on the surface, little eddies and whirls where it flowed into the cracks in the rock. Its surface was fifty feet below us, but I could almost feel how heavy it was, how much force was down there, and there was something floating in the water.
Clinging to the hole's back wall, looking positively tiny in comparison, was a mass of something that could be called bodies. Bones, but didn't look like human ones, all tangled in a big sloping mass, tied together by heads and limbs. It must've been hundreds of 'em. The ones on the ground here were the lucky ones.
In that moment I stopped bein' able to hold what was in my stomach. I vomited, and Pablo screamed, and pulled my back on my ass and everything was quiet, until the vomit hit the water. Just like that, it was like a bell was hit, there was this ringing that passed through me and the ground and everything around me, and I felt like I was hanging face first off the edge with a force pulling downward, and I looked up and the mountains in the distance looked blueish and wet.
My leg was stuck in a crack, and I could hear the rush of dark water, and something cold hit my leg, and then burning, like I was being bit by a thousand little pincers. I screamed, and I tried to run, but my leg wouldn't work, so I leaned on Pablo and he half guided me, half carried me back to the truck. I was sick and it felt like my leg was being sliced into pieces and I could barely hear the things Pablo was screaming at me not to do while he loaded me up in the truck and drove away.
I saw the hole from the truck, there, and the water level was higher than I remembered it being."

I watched, breathless, as he hoisted his foot up onto the bar, then took off his shoe and his knee-length compression sock. Before I could comment on the absurdity of the situation I saw it, speckled, on his skin.
Coiling black and blue scars, indented like they were carved out by a spoon, interrupted by scalie blotches of scar tissue. In the center of each of the coils, a little white sphere was nestled. A fish eye, peaking out through his dark growths of skin.

"Still hurts like a bitch sometimes. If ol' Pablo was right about one thing, it was that once the waters get in you, they ain't never coming out. If that's the proof you want, you've got it."

He pulled the compression sock and shoe back on, wincing. Something smelled wrong in the air.

"So that there's your story. Never seen Las Aguas Enegrecidas up close again, bless it, but the towns kept going. Only one or two a decade, I'd gauge it, but I've lived a long time and those decades add up.
We're running out of water, son, down here in the Southwest. We're running out of water, and something's rushin' in to replace it."


FluffyDog00

Check out the rest of my works here: Author Page

Ted acted on instinct, only now coming to his senses. He shuddered at the audacity of his own actions.

Ted Landa's sweaty hands struggled to keep a grip on the pistol. His index finger jittered up-and-down over the trigger, nervous to do the deed. He closed his eyes.
BLAM!
Russel tumbled to the floor. Ted gazed at the hole in his former co-worker's forehead, oozing blood that ran down to his lips like a river. Ted, once a compliant pushover, had finally said that he was fed up, his words being the gunfire that he brought upon Russel.
A collection of video arcade machines stood above the corpse, as if they were in triumph. The murderer had finally paid for his crimes. Now, it was time for them to rest.
Ted held up his pistol as steadily as he could, and aimed at the arcade machines. He fired away, making sure to use three bullets for each cabinet. Smoke and sparks emerged from them like fireworks.
He stared at the now-lifeless arcade games. The stench of battery acid and flesh reminded him of the ungodly acts that were committed in that basement.
Everything before that very moment was a blur. Ted acted on instinct, only now coming to his senses. He shuddered at the audacity of his own actions. It was an outrageous move to make.
But then again, Russel had murdered children.
Suddenly, Ted heard a buzzing sound in his right ear. A machine had turned on. It sat in the far right corner of the room, and had a screen that was glitchy beyond recognition.
Suddenly, the screen displayed something - a message. Ted inched closer to read it.
“YOU HAVE FREED US.”
There was a pause.
“THANK YOU.”
There was another pause.
“YOU ARE NOT THE BAD GUY.”
Ted stared at that last sentence for a long time. The screen then turned to black, and Ted let out a sigh of relief.
As he turned away from the machines to leave, Ted's widened expression scrunched up. He knew what he had to do next.
Although he had been forgiven for his sins, it wasn't enough. The children Ted avenged were only a portion of the hundreds that died in the name of Arcadia. He knew there was only one way to end the slaughter for good, and that was to kill the big man himself.
Ted left the basement. A once frightened man now walked with determination in his stride, and he would not be satisfied until he had Dan Dunn hanging from the ceiling by his own necktie.


Content Warning: Depiction of an Overdose
Dr. Katherine Sinclair inspected herself in the mirror, running her hand over the medical-grade eyepatch installed over her left eye—or more accurately, where her left eye used to be. "No hope of saving it?" she asked.
"It was completely destroyed." Montgomery Reynolds sat behind her; it was a limit of two people in the same room at St. Francis de Sales Hospital. It was closer to the storage unit than Site-87, and she had been in dire need of medical care. "They might be able to regrow it in a few years. We've made leaps and bounds in growing tissue, even outside of the Foundation."
Sinclair looked down at her hands. "I can still read, I can still write, I can still see. I just can't do it as well. I'll be fine." She chewed her lip. "Don't start, Monty."
Reynolds had about to been open his mouth to speak. "How did you know I was going to say something?"
"Because we live in Sloth's Pit, and it's been straying more towards cliché territory of late." She shook her head. "I'm not dumb enough to think that you'd stop loving me because I'm missing an eye. I could be a cloud of energy and you'd still want to curl up on a couch on Friday and watch true crime shows."
Reynolds smiled, and looked out of the room; through the glass, he could see agents Tofflemire and Carol. He sighed. "Blast it all. I just…" He clenched his hands. "You look like you need a hug."
Sinclair looked back in the mirror. "Time for that later, Monty. Let them in, I'm sure they have questions."
Reynolds nodded, giving a respectful bow to Sinclair, before opening the door. Agent Carol entered as he exited, taking out a bottle of disinfectant spray and applying it to the chair Reynolds had vacated before sitting down in it.
"So," Carol said. "Let's start from the top."

There was a knock on the wall in the hallway that drew Robert's attention. He looked up to see the begoggled form of Seren Pryce, her hair in a ponytail, clad in some approximation of tactical gear. She sat by Robert. "Came in February's stead. He's still getting used to the wheelchair."
Tofflemire nodded and sat up against the wall, sighing. "Has the world gone crazy, or has it always been this bad?"
"Hard to say." Pryce stretched. "The whole millenium so far has been a clusterfuck. I'm wondering if we're even going to live to see…" She shook her head. "Nevermind. That's way too morbid for right now, and we need less morbid."
"We could go down to the children's ward?" Upon seeing the terrified look on Pryce's face, Tofflemire quickly amended the statement with, "They're doing trick-or-treat for the kids there! Jesus."
"And here I thought your sense of humor had just gotten incredibly fucked, like the rest of the town." Pryce rubbed her brow and reached into her pocket, taking out an orange bottle full of pills with a blue cap. She opened it and popped one into her hand, before screwing the container back shut.
Tofflemire's eyes widened. "Please tell me those aren't tranquilizers."
"These?" Pryce looked at the container. "Antihistamines. They have a mild sedative effect— won't leave you on your ass like Benadryl, just makes it so that you're not incredibly anxious." She rolled the capsule into the hand. "Been having bad dreams lately. That's all."
"Manifestation hasn't targeted you yet." Robert frowned. "What are you anxious of?"
Obviously lying, Seren replied with "I'm afraid that the Ghost of Black Fridays past is salty about losing that arm-wrestling match." She rolled her eyes, instinctively reaching for a non-existent hip flask. "Dammit. Hey, can you get me some water from the vending machine?"
"I'll put it on your tab." Robert rose and went around the corner. The errand shouldn't have taken more than three minutes— it was almost fifteen before Pryce got up to look around.
"Tofflemire?" she called. "You good?"
The pill in her hand started to roll away; she caught it, wincing. It was starting to melt from the heat of her hand. She shook her head and muttered an insult at expense of both Tofflemire and whatever phone game he had gotten engrossed in, before sticking the pill in her mouth and swallowing it dry.
When she was a child, she had refused to take capsules you needed to swallow; her mother had resorted to opening some capsules and mixing the powder within with pudding or else sticking them in Jell-O. There was a reason Pryce always got the flavorless cookies with dessert in the mess, as opposed to either of those desserts. A bit of that anxiety remained.
And that anxiety was all that was needed.
Pryce found herself choking, grasping at her throat, coughing. Her face turned red, then purple, as Tofflemire came back around the corner; to the him, it had only been four minutes. The machine had had trouble accepting his card. He ran over to his fellow agent, calling for a medic, the water bottle forgotten on the floor behind him.
Seren Pryce's face turned blue as Tofflemire began compressions.

October 31st, 2020
Seren Pryce woke up far away from the hospital; she recognized where she was immediately. Site-87's shooting range. She had never fallen asleep here, would never fall asleep here— active fire zones are dangerous when awake, but when asleep, you're a hazard to yourself and everyone else. Even in a controlled environment like a firing range, there's still a chance of something like a ricochet and— it didn't matter. Pryce wondered who the hell had let her fall asleep here.
She surveyed the area— a clock on the wall read 4:00 PM. It had been around 2:50 when she had met up with Tofflemire at the hospital. Had she blacked out because of the medication? If so, why hadn't he just propped her up in her quarters?
"Fuckin'…" Pryce rubbed her head. "I'm in a goddamn manifestation, aren't I? Okay, just… calm down. Figure out what's up with this reality, what's weird—" Pryce looked around the range. She knew every inch of it like the back of her hand—except for one thing.
There was a funeral urn on one of the lanes. The one she had woken up in front of. And next to it was a picture— her picture.
She crossed over to the urn, and read the engraving on it:

SEREN PRYCE
REQUIESCAT IN PACE

She fell back on the floor, stunned. "Not real." Pryce tugged at her hair. "Not real. I'm not dead. I'm not dead."

Earlier
Alison held up an empty prescription bottle, looking between it and the room Pryce had been rushed into.
"Lucky it happened at the hospital, at least." Robert rubbed his hair. "Choking on a pill like that, what are the odds?"
"How many pills were in this bottle, Bob?" Alison held up the empty orange container, the other holding up her phone.
"Uh… fuck, maybe half a month's supply?" Robert looked on the floor. "Wait… where's the rest?"
"I think she took them all." Alison searched up the medication on her phone. "…good news is that these capsules are only about 50mg each, and there doesn't seem to be a lethal dose, but…" She frowned. "You think—"
"She got whammied, we both know it." Robert walked around, shaking his head. "But… why? What the hell is she scared of that involves her downing a whole bunch of pills?"
"Let's focus less on that and more how to get it out of her. I can't write it out, so…" Alison put away her phone. "I need you to promise not to be mad at me."
"…about?"
From another pocket, she removed a Faraday bag, opening it to pull out a smartphone that Robert had never seen before; it was far smaller than any Foundation-issue phone he had seen, lacked all the mass that a dozen pieces of tracking hardware would give it. "Okay, you have a second phone." Robert frowned. "I already don't like where this is going…"
Alison turned on this new phone, and opened up the only page that had been in its internet history since she got it in July.
"Is that Parawatch?" Robert moved in closer to read the screen. "'Tracking of Midwestern Phobic Migration, Summer 2020-to-Question-Mark-Question-Mark'." He frowned. "Alice… what is this?"
Alison sighed. "I… I've been tracking this thing for a while."
"What." Robert frowned, then looked aghast, confused, nauseous, all at once. "You— you knew about this. That this was coming. And… and you did… nothing?"
Alison shook her head. "I just— I just got told that something was going to happen. They advised me to keep tabs on it here, and—"
"And who told you this?"
Alison flinched back. Robert hadn't looked this serious since… ever. Any sense of mirth had gone from his eyes. "Bob, I'm sorry, but… it's a long story, and we don't have time." She scrolled through the phone. "There's a post on here that talks about a situation like Pryce's, I just have to find it—"
Robert pinched the bridge of his nose. "Give me one good reason for me to not turn you in after we save her, bearing in mind that 'we're friends' is not a good reason."
"Bob…" Alison sighed. "Later. Let's… we need to fix her."

Seren Pryce wandered through the halls of Site-87. It was entirely vacant, from the shooting range to the Director's Office, the residence level, and all of the research and containment levels. She didn't bother calling; if she actually was dead, nobody could hear her.
"Maybe it's like that one guy at 19?" She frowned. "Whatshisbucket, that agent who's constantly out of phase with reality. Hmm." She shook her head. "No, this… this isn't real. And… what kind of fear is that? Dead's dead. Don't feel anything. Why…" She frowned. Thoughts of Christmas came back into her head— a vision she'd had, an anxiety-induced hallucination. One where she saw her name upon the memorial plaque by the barracks, next to the names of the rest of her squad.
All of whom were listed as KIA on October 31st of 2020.
"Right." Pryce snorted. "L-like they… like they would die that easy. I'm… why would…" She snorted. "I… god, why would just killing me lead to everyone else dying? I'm just a… an expendable cog. They don't need me."
And, she thought, A machine missing even one cog is good as broken.
Then a blinding light came from beneath her, and Pryce found herself flung upwards, going through the ceiling. She stopped when she hit the sky; or rather, a bubble that blocked Sloth's Pit's airspace from the rest of reality. The nexus had an upper vertical limit of about 3 miles, and from up here, she saw what was left of the town.
Everything south of Main Street was on fire— the forest, the schools, houses, everything. The place where the Camp Krakkow Memorial had been was a crater. She could feel the heat from this height, and if she'd had skin, she was sure it would'dve melted.
The north of town looked like a warzone. Trenches had been dug into the forest, buildings had been razed. She saw a massive… thing walking through the rubble of what had once been Berry's Restaurant, blood around what might charitably be called a mouth. Its footsteps shook the ground as it slammed into a building next to the restaurant, creating a domino effect and destroying the whole block.
Pryce willed herself to move downwards, towards the carnage. There were bodies in the street. Men without their heads, women whose eyes had been torn out, and the children… Pryce looked away when she saw a crib with a bloodstain in it. A thought crossed her mind— What is a crib doing on Main Street? There's no residential areas here, it makes no sense. But it didn't matter. The sight of it was enough to keep her here.
The warzone grew closer. She saw the trenches up close. She saw a head poke up over the edge of one, wearing a Foundation-issue helmet, then several more poke up underneath it. Severed heads, skewered by some massive spike-like limb, rising from the ground. She recognized the faces behind the helmets— the Williamses. February. Ewell. Alice and Bob.
"No way. This isn't real." Pryce felt along her body— she wasn't in her fatigues. If she was, then there would be a card somewhere in her pocket. Memetic knockout agent, to be used in case of exposure to a dangerous anomaly that relied on consciousness. She could just do that and wake up, right? There had to be one back at the Site—
Pryce turned to face the Site. All she saw on the hill was another smoking crater.

"Are you Insurgency?"
Alison looked at Robert with a blank expression. "If I was, I'd have killed you months ago."
"Then what? GOC?"
"No." She kept scrolling through her phone, trying to keep tears from her eyes. She wished she hadn't bothered with the mascara this morning. "Bob, you saw what I can do. I saved Sinclair. I can save this whole damn town if you just…" She sighed. "I'm sorry, I am. There's time to be angry after we save Seren."
Robert looked at her, inclining his head in something resembling a nod. He began to wonder if Alison had ever been his friend to begin with, or if this… thing was just something that had infiltrated the Foundation years ago, pretending to be his partner, his friend. Would he even find records of her in SCiPNET? He considered looking her up on his phone.
Alison, for her part, scrolled to the correct forum post and opened it. "Here."

whoah guys update coming to you from opioid country Missouri. i just found this thread and holy shit it describes what happened back in august
basically: my brother had been clean from heroin for about three years, but we were always afraid of him going back and overdosing. he got in a car crash and was perscribed painkillers, fuckers at the pharmacy gave him oxy. we told him to throw them out, and he did, but when we went to check on him HE WAS FUCKING DEAD.
mom and dad started fighting, said it was each others's fault, never seen them that angry. he wouldn't wake up, even after i gave him narcan and he wasn't breathing at all christ i was so scared
it hought mom and dad were going to kill each other right there in front of my brother's cooling body and then i would have nothing. i didn't know what to do i just started fucking crying and curled up in the corner while mom ran to my brother's kitchen to grab a knife and it was a clusterfuck
then out of FUCKING NOWHERE my brother's cat Ghost (yes that is really his name) comes barreling out of the kitchen; he'd been locked in the knife cupboard and he just flew at my brother's body, hitting him in the chest. HE FUCKING WOKE UP. MAGIC FUCKING CAT. it was like something snapped mom and dad stopped arguing, i stopped crying, and there was this massive weight lifted everywhere
so yeah if this happens again and there's an overdose part of this migration, try getting something to wake them up that doesn't have any real attachment to them idk

"Enlightening," Robert scowled. "So, what, we find a cat and tell it to give Pryce compressions? Hit her in the chest ourselves? This isn't the movies, Alison."
"…Robert. I literally brought you back to life with an adrenaline shot through your fucking heart. Straight out of Pulp Fiction. You can't tell me that it won't work!" She grabbed at her hair. "God dammit all, what the fuck? I— there was more to this post, I swear there was." She scrolled down, seeing that there was a post reply, but it was marked as 'unavailable'.
"What else have you done since you got these powers?" Robert frowned. "Delete an entire site from existence? Murder an agent? Hell, did you cause this?"
"I—" Alison sighed. "Remember the Jamburglar?"
He blinked, several times. "…how?"
"I wanted to experiment. Bad idea, in hindsight, but… it was kinda funny, kinda harmless?"
"Ruby had to shower for twelve hours before she could be fully un-stuck from jam, and the test kitchen still smells like strawberry when it's hot out." Robert pinched the bridge of his nose. "I… can't believe you'd be this irresponsible, Alice. We need…" He sighed. "I need to call the Site. Report this to them, get someone over here to arrest an enemy agent…"
Alison looked down at the table. Neither of them questioned the other's behavior.

Seren floated into the trenches. The spindly things around her didn't so much as look in her direction; she prayed that they weren't spiders. The idea of 'this isn't real' was fading from her mind the further away she went from the remains of the Site. But it couldn't be. She had her hands, her feet… ghosts weren't uncommon, but… she'd been with a ghost. She knew what being around one was like, and this wasn't it.
"Sera," she muttered, "Just… think of something to ground you. Anything. Just…" Her head pulsed as she tried to think of any of the faces she hadn't seen among the carnage. Faces that hadn't been skewered on the spider-things, or whose names she hadn't read on the mud-covered, ruined chest armor lining the trench below her. "You're a soldier, dammit. Soldier's nothing without her unit, just… think of anyone in your unit… someone…"
A thought crossed her mind, one that made her laugh— February looked better with his head on a pike than he did in the hospital this whole last month. She paused. "February shouldn't be ready for active combat. This…" She looked around. "I have to focus on that fact. February's maimed he shouldn't be out of the hospital for another… what, three months? Poor son of a bitch…" She sat down with her back to the wall of the trench. "If February is here, then this isn't real. If this isn't real, then you can come back. Just… keep thinking…"

"Bob, we can't waste time getting someone down here to arrest me. I still work for the Foundation!"
"Then why not tell us about this?"
"…lapse of judgement." Alison admitted with a sigh. "Look. There are a dozen Foundation Sites between here and Arkansas. Doesn't the fact that none of them looked into it strike you as kinda suspect? In the slightest?"
"Maybe you stopped them from—"
"Oh give it a rest, Tofflemire, you stupid—"
Alison was silenced when Robert drew his gun on her, right in the middle of the thankfully vacant cafeteria. She stood up, and back, going for her own weapon. "Is this what we've come to?" She asked. "Mexican goddamn standoff? Really, Bob?"
"Y… you're a traitor."
"I'm your friend. If you don't think I am, then just…" She swallowed. "Then just shoot me, you stupid goddamn motherfucking son—"
"—of a BITCH!" called a voice that wasn't accustomed to swearing. The two agents swiveled to face Raymond February, entering the cafeteria on his wheelchair. "What in God's Name are you two doing?"
"We…" Robert frowned, looking between his gun, and at Alison. She was still the same woman who barely tolerated his humor, but the tear streaks through her mascara were new. "I… I don't know." He frowned. "Did…"
Alison looked at Robert, and down at herself, rubbing her eyes on her sleeves. The smudged makeup looked more like warpaint. "I… I think we got whammied, Bob." Then, to February, "What are you doing here, Ray?"
February looked between the two of them as Robert stowed his gun. "I… I can't explain it. I was in town, trying to get used to my wheelchair, and… I swear, I heard Pryce calling my name, from the direction of the hospital. I got here as quick as I could and I figured you two would be in here, and… where's Pryce?"
"Fifth floor, in a coma. You…" Alison looked at her phone. "I'm an idiot. Of course… nobody who's been under the influence of this thing and escaped has done so without outside help. You— you're not involved in this, and that's why…" She pinched the bridge of her nose. "We need to get you to see Pryce, now."
"Why me? I… I shouldn't even be talking to you. I still don't have clearance back."
"If that really was Pryce's voice, then she called you here for a reason. If not…" Robert looked up at the ceiling. "Maybe the big guy's doing us a favor, sending you here."
February contemplated that as Robert pushed him to the bank of elevators, with Alison walking alongside him, looking through her phone.

"February's here, so this isn't real. February's here, so this isn't real. February is here, so this isn't real."
The trenches grew colder and darker as the sun and firelight faded. She stood, attempting to stand on top of one of the corpses of her compatriots and get a better look over the top of the trench— what was left of the town was overshadowed by something massive and bulbous. It pulsed like a heart, but it was too round, too uniform, and the odd, stumpy structure on the top almost made it look like…
…like a pumpkin.
"Now I know this isn't real." Pryce climbed out of the trench. "We burned you to the ground years ago, you stupid goddamn pumpk—" She tripped, which shouldn't have been possible; by all accounts, her form was immaterial. But now, she found a vine wrapping around her leg, dragging her underground. Her mind told her not to panic; her body didn't care. She clawed at the muddy, blood-soaked ground, finding no purchase, letting out a loud scream.

The three agents entered Pryce's room just in time to see her start crashing. Her heartbeat spiked high enough that Alison thought it was going to go off the scale, and the woman's body jolted as if it was being pulled apart in ten different directions.
"Shit!" Robert ran out into the hall. "Crash cart! We need a crash cart in here!"
But nobody responded. It was as if the whole floor was deserted.
"Hey!" Robert called. "Anyone! We need help in here!"
February gazed around the room; the other two agents were too preoccupied with trying to find help to see it. In the bathroom across from Pryce's bed, on the wall, was a black and yellow box. February rolled over to it, pulled it off the wall, and came back to the bed. "Tofflemire!" he called.
Midway through another call, Robert's attention snapped back to February.
"I need you to open Pryce's shirt." February hefted the box in his lap— large, black letters read 'AUTOMATED EXTERNAL DEFIBRILLATOR'.

Seren Pryce swore she heard a heart rate monitor spike as another vine emerged from the ground, wrapping around her throat. She grabbed at the vine, tears coming from her eyes. Counselors had said she had 'suicidal tendencies', but she had never wanted to die, not really— and it was only now that she realized this fact. She let out a screaming sob as soil began to fill her mouth.
There was a sound of thunder. In the clouds above, she saw lightning snake its way through the atmosphere in random patterns. But… they weren't random. They almost looked like fingers, and they were reaching towards her.
Another thunderclap. The vines began to retreat. Seren reached her hand upwards, towards the lightning, coughing on dirt… but since when did dirt taste like activated charcoal? It didn't.
There was the sound of something charging, high-pitched, growing to a crescendo. Then, Seren Pryce felt a semi truck land on her chest and sat bolt upright, vomiting her stomach contents, and said activated charcoal, onto her bedsheets at St. Francis de Sales. She looked at the room around her— Tofflemire and Carol were standing there, both stunned. February was manning the defibrillator, and she felt a slight jolt from the paddles on her chest. All of those assembled looked at February.
"What?" He asked. "This isn't some cheap medical drama. These things are meant to stop your heart so it can restart at its regular rhythm—" A pause. "Did none of you take the course on how to use these back in September?"
There was a series of sheepish looks traded among the other agents, before Seren, her dignity destroyed, tore off the paddles and got up from the bed and made her way over to the bathroom, as the rest of the medication started purging itself.

Two hours later, Alison Carol sat alone in Sloth's Pit's largely abandoned dog park. Only two citizens were out in the field, both walking small dogs in the late-October cold. She sighed, looking at the empty seat on the bench by her. Robert shouldn't have taken this long to get here. Where was he?
In answer, Robert came from the other side, tapping her on the shoulder with a piping hot paper tray of french fries from a food truck down the street. They were covered in malt vinegar and salt. "Took me a while to get the right amount." He sat by her, his own tray covered in ketchup. "I know you like them saturated."
Alison looked between him and the fries, frowning. "So… what, are we good?"
Robert didn't respond. The two of them ate in peace, and when Alison could see the bottom of her tray, he spoke. "Pryce is going to be in the hospital for a few more days. They want to keep her for observation." Then, he chewed his lip. "February showing up there… kind of a deus ex machina. Thought the town hated those."
"Maybe it's more 'deus' than 'ex machina'." Alison looked upwards. "February came in because he heard Seren's voice. Sounds kinda divine to me, don't you think?"
"Well, at least we got Heaven playing on our team. That's something, I guess?" Robert looked at the last of his fries and sighed. "I know what I was afraid of, back there. Losing you."
"Bob—"
"Not like that!" He laughed. "Alice, you're my best friend. And… the thought of you just… keeping something like that from me, that you weren't who you said you were… I was afraid I'd lost you. And I think you felt the same." He chewed his lip. "God, just… seeing you with the makeup running down your face. Made me snap out of it. I'm sorry."
Alison finished her fries. "I'm still loyal to the Foundation. But… I didn't think it would explode this badly. I kept wanting to tell you, but there was always a new fire to put out." She brought out her phone, opening up the forum post again. "The fear started with Pryce, and it just… kinda snowballed from there. Like with this."
There was a pause, before Robert replied. "I'm good if you are," He shook his head. "But… who gave you that link? Who are you working for?"
Alison looked at the phone; a text message had come through on it.

Need 2 talk. Baker Books, Noon Tomorrow. Bring the Idiot.

Alison rolled her eyes, and shot back:

1) okay and 2) fuck you, he's not an idiot. he's my friend.

She stowed her phone and sighed. "Tomorrow. Promise."
Robert nodded, giving Alison an uneasy smile. For the time being, a truce had been declared over a plate of fries.

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