Cybersecurity, Human Error, PTSD and Swiss Cheese.

Defense-in-depth is a crucial concept in cybersecurity. In essence, you never want to protect your data with a single safeguard, because any given safeguard can fail. You don't want to just run an antivirus. You want the antivirus in case the protection on your browser doesn't notice that a virus is trying to look like a regular file. You want good security settings on your browser that prevent most malware from even getting there in the first place. You should probably be using a proxy or a VPN when you're downloading vintage German torture porn, so that it looks like it's some yokel in Topeka downloading it, not a fine upstanding citizen like you.
Think about defense-in-depth like slices of Swiss cheese. Any given slice is going to have some holes in it. But when you start stacking slices and turning them ninety degrees, it's much harder for something to get through all of the holes. Your sweet onion sauce stays between the cheese and the meat, instead of leaking out and making your bread all gooey too soon. Fuck, I'm hungry. You see how we got here?
Anyway, defense-in-depth is important for the internet. But it's really just a more specific version of what we do in the real world. We're always trusting people to do their jobs, even when we don't think about it. You trust the people who built the road you drive on, and the car you're using to drive it. You trust the people who bottled your milk, the cow it came from, and the guy with an unhealthy enthusiasm for milking it. This trust, this belief that things work a certain way, even extends past people. You trust the seasons to change somewhat regularly, but not so regularly you can't complain about wearing long pants in fucking August. You trust cats to meow and not bark. You trust gravity. I mean, I'm assuming you do, since you're not chunky Mexican salsa at the bottom of a cliff.
Sorry, I keep going back to food.
Anyway, the point is, you trust all of that. But the reason defense-in-depth is important is that you can't trust any one thing. It's all going to fail at some point, you just want it to be less likely for everything to fail at the same time. But no matter how many slices of Swiss cheese you're using, at some point, you might accidentally line up all the holes, and something might slip through the cracks. When it comes to computers, there's always going to be an element of human error: Somebody has a late night alone at the office and decides they need to download a copy of Schlockenglockenspiel Sleutzenbergers 7 to take the edge off, and they can only find a low-res rip of the VHS on a website covered in ads saying Click Here! This is the LinkedIn of Cunnilingus! All the precautions in the world can get undone by one stupid, horny asshole who wants to jack off in his cubicle after hours. And whoops, there it is, on a professional workstation in what should be the most secure network in the world.
Something that shouldn't be there.

Derek Kato, civilian, uncapped a third stout with his lighter, tossed another log on the fire, and sniffed the numb feeling out of his nose. It was a little cold, by Hawaii standards at least, but he couldn't quite be fucked to get up and get a real jacket, and he didn't feel too much in his arms these days anyway. Instead, the denim vest with a bunch of patches stapled on and decade-old paint stains from the odd jobs he'd done back in college was keeping him warm enough. Fuck it.
He tapped his phone again, the Bluetooth speaker on the seat across from him, on the other side of the fire started jauntily strumming an acoustic guitar. "I got my toes in the water, ass in the sand, not a worry in the world, a cold beer in my hand—Life is good today."
Derek swung his beer bottle up vertically and held it there for a long second, swallowing hard. One out of five wasn't bad, right?
"Jesus Christ, you actually listen to this bro country shit?" Said a voice from his yard's side gate. He'd heard the crunching on his gravel, but it didn't have the frantic feel of some ice-head trying to steal his stereo. Most people didn't even make it this far off the road, or this far from Hilo, especially not this far from Pahoa.
"They played it all the goddamn time in the MWR-" he pronounced the acronym out loud, like 'mwar', unpleasantly enough, "-on deployment. Spend a year listening to something and it grows on you."
"Like a fungus," said Jeremy, sitting down next to him. The plastic lawn chair pitched unpleasantly underneath him and he lifted it up, bending the warped leg as straight as he could and sitting unsteadily. "Beer me. No way I'm listening to this sober." There was a moment of silence once the caps came off the bottles, and they clinked them together and took a drink. Jeremy brought his back down and took a second sip before Derek had finished his first pull. "Not bad, man. Is this what you do these days? Decent beer, shitty country music?"
"Hey, this is a top tier middle-shelf beer," Derek replied, mock-defensive. "But more or less."
"You been looking for work?"
"Can't say I have," he said, polishing off his beer and leaving the last one in the six-pack up for grabs. "I get forty percent. That and the GI bill, I'm good to go for a couple years. Figure I'll pick up another degree, maybe AJ."
"Officers get the GI bill?" Jeremy asked incredulously. He zipped down his fleece, the log on the fire was catching pretty well, and his well-padded frame was making him a little extra warm. Keeping the jacket on hid the bay window of his straining buttons, but it was overkill for Hawaii.
"Hey, I worked for a living until I got my bachelor's." He shrugged. "It's good to see you man, but you showed up for a reason. Are you trying to get me to join the dark side?"
"I'm not even a contractor anymore," Jeremy said, smiling. "I have a kind of weird job right now. It's pretty much like DoD civilian work, but on paper you're more, uh, DoD-adjacent. Money's good. They like hiring prior service."
"I don't know if I want to do government work at all," Derek said, sniffing, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, rubbing his arms with shaky hands. "That last one fucked me up pretty bad."
"It's not like being back in, man," he said back, taking another sip of the beer. "You're not in uniform. They treat you like people."
"I don't feel like people either," he said, peeking up from his bent-over position. He wasn't a bad-looking guy, but he was tired, and the harsh light from the fire wasn't doing him any favors. His brown skin was pockmarked with old shaving scars from ingrown hairs, and his eyes had deep-etched bags. He wasn't as fit as he had been a couple years ago, and there was a layer of softness over faded muscle. His hair was buzzed short, but he'd done it himself, leaving awkward, quarter-inch patches that stood out against the bald.
"Getting a job might be a good cure," Jeremy said, giving him another shrug. "Something to fill up the time."
"That's the thing, man," he said. "I like filling up my time with nothing, 'cause you know what the weird thing is? I can remember it, even when it's fuck all. I don't remember shit from that last deployment."
"Huh," Jeremy said, finishing his beer. "That sounds pretty rough. The uh, the medical, where I work, it's pretty good. Better than the VA. They keep shrinks on staff."
"You're sounding kind of like the VA. Used to be every other time I'd call—let's put you in touch with a recruiter, Captain Kato, go back in, that'll fix all your problems." He sniffed again, rubbing his nose. "What sort of work needs shrinks on call anyway?"
"If I told you, I'd have to kill you." Jeremy said, grabbing and uncapping the last beer, taking a pull on it and then handing it over.
"I'm not the only one who got soft. I'm pretty sure I'd still fold you," said Derek. "Devil dog."
"Please. You'd be bleeding Air Force Blue in thirty seconds." They shared the little dangerous grin of junior enlisted with the stink of high school still on their breath, daring each other to try it. But they weren't twenty-two and fucking around unsupervised in Waikiki anymore. They were older, now, old enough they'd still feel an Indian burn tomorrow. "Seriously though, I know I don't keep in touch for shit, but I've been worried about you, bud. Just get me a resume."
"Yeah, okay," Derek said, halfheartedly. He drank a third of the beer in one go, exhaling sharply and staring into the fire, wordlessly handing it back. "I need government work like a hole in the head."

Trust is a virtue, but it doesn't always succeed.
Half a world away, some guy was sitting down at a desk with a sandwich. He was hungry, and he trusted his keyboard to keep working against the mounting fuckpile of crumbs between the keys. He trusted that sweet onion sauce not to leak through the layers of his sandwich and drip onto the Oakleys tucked into the collar of his polo shirt when he took a sloppy, distracted bite of his lunch. He trusted his instincts telling him to reach blindly for a napkin, and bashed his knee into the desk. Then he fell over and scattered some papers and made a really embarrassing set of noises and curse words.
So this lovable, relatable guy made a mistake. That's on him. Other people trusted this guy, too, to look over every last note in every file on his desk. To do reliable data entry, cover everybody's ass. They trusted him to catch any mistakes anyone had made, to raise the red flags in a personnel file, to double-check those flags against a big database full of all the red flags in the world. They trusted him to then stamp a big digital 'NOPE' on someone with a flag that was too big or too red. His coworkers trusted him to do his job right and not accidentally mash the wrong, sticky key on Derek Kato's background profile while he was falling on his ass. They trusted him, because he should have noticed that while the nature of the incident itself was on a need-to-know basis, Derek Kato had been previously amnesticized, and thus should have been barred from holding a position within the Foundation.
He trusted his coworkers to be adults and not to make a big deal out of his embarrassing working lunch, but pretty soon the whole office started calling him "Sweet Onion." It's not like it offended him or something, it's just that he figured they weren't in fucking high school anymore, and that cutesy little nicknames weren't becoming of professional people. Of course, nobody listened to him, because nobody ever did, so I mean, you could hardly blame him for missing a single file, right? Or for some unsubstantiated after-hours video downloads?
Besides, at least three people should have had eyes on that folder before he did. The Foundation is just a big fucking stack of Swiss cheese, same as anything else. Derek Kato was the sweet onion sauce slipping through a perfect, coincidental stack of holes. Defense-in-depth had failed, and Derek Kato would go on to become a cautionary tale for exactly why those safeguards were so important.

Derek Kato, civilian, dusted off his old service dress clip-on tie, put it in place, and glanced down to the paper copy of his resume. He sniffed, his face twisting as he looked himself over in the mirror, and then brought one hand up, placing his index finger against his temple and pretending to fire. Like a hole in the head.
Too many beers. He'd ended up agreeing to it, and two days was all it took to get an interview. Somebody actually flew out from the mainland somewhere to give him a face-to-face. Jeremy was an alright guy and an old friend but the whole situation was giving him the heebie-jeebies already. Then again, he hadn't really been doing anything since he got out. He glanced at the mess of his desk, empty plastic water bottles in an untidy row next to a mounting pyramid of beer caps. Underneath the caps, VA forms he'd never bothered to mail.
His mouth twisted further, and he grabbed his keys. Getting out of the house would be good for him, if nothing else.
Twenty minutes later, Derek's pick-up truck rumbled past the shitty little strip-mall. He eyed the Subway, the pizza place that was too familiar with him, and lighted on the one spot that kept rotating out. Now it looked like some burger joint. They'd never make it more than a couple months. Beefbelly Bill's? It didn't ring a bell, but it had the plastic, factory-cut sheen of a franchise. He knew the pattern: open up a shop in Hilo, everybody goes apeshit for it, try to expand out to Pahoa or Honoka'a, then in six months when everybody in town goes back to McDonald's, you've stretched your money too thin and your dreams of being an entrepreneur are over.
His phone lit up in the passenger seat, fading in the sound of a slack-key guitar ringtone and he exhaled heavily through his nose. He glanced around. There were a few cars on the road, so he pulled into the parking lot outside the strip. Hawaii cops didn't have to identify their vehicles at all, and he'd had enough beer last night he might still fail a breathalyzer. He fumbled, trying to catch the phone before it stopped and bouncing one of his wheels off the curb. An old aunty shot him a withering look from the patio table at the Subway.
"Hey—Hello, sorry, Derek speaking," he said into the phone, killing his groaning engine.
"This is mister Derek Kato, correct?" The voice was feminine, but with the flat, clipped, vaguely disappointed tone of a second-grade teacher. Or an officer gunning for promotion and trying not to come off as a 'bitch' for speaking like the men did.
"That's me," he said, while trying to look apologetic and guilty to the aunty. She just glared one more time, shaking her head and muttering to herself.
"Hello! My apologies, this is your interviewer. I've had some difficulty getting my rental car, but I'll be there shortly," said the lady on the phone. "I hope this doesn't give you an unsteady feeling, I just don't usually operate in the area."
"No worries," said Derek. "Island time can come at you fast when you get here."
"It's beautiful. It seems like a good place to retire," came the reply. "I'll make this up to you. Jeremy recommended a place near you—Hillbilly Bob's? If you haven't already driven all the way up. My treat."
"Beefbelly Bill's? Sure," said Derek. He was squinting at the place. Something was bothering him. It wasn't just the residual aunty-guilt. "I'll be there."
"Thank you for your understanding." There was something more, but the line went dead. He was intimately familiar with the deadzone she'd just hit on the highway. He let out a breath and opened the door, letting in a touch of trade-wind to cool himself down. Wearing a dress shirt was making him itchy. He stood out like a sore thumb wearing this, but an aloha shirt would have been the wrong vibe for an interview with someone from the mainland. The aunty's eyes were still following him. Judging. He stepped out, reached in for his little folder and looked at the place. He needed to pee.
The inside of Beefbelly Bill's was sterile. It had a unique smell, like all fast food joints, born of their particular combination of meat burps and economy-scale cleaning fluid. There were only three or four people sitting inside, and another two behind the counter. "Hey, howzit, I need fo'—" he started, and met the eyes of a gangly white college kid. He code-switched immediately. "Good morning. Could I get the key to the restroom?"
"Hi, welcome to Beefbelly Bill's! I'm terribly sorry sir, but I can't give out the key without a purchase," said the kid. He wasn't the bored fast food employee. He was the annoyingly chipper, upbeat one, trying too hard on his first job. "Could I interest you in our BLT burger?"
"No thank you," said Derek. He winced, shifting his weight. Buying food in advance would look like a snub to the interviewer, but he'd have to deal with the judgey Aunty if he went to the Subway and the pizza place wasn't open yet. God, he had really forgotten how to deal with being in public. "I'm going to buy something in a little bit, could I get the key to the restroom first?"
"I'm so sorry sir! Here at Beefbelly Bill's, customer service is our number one priority, but we do have strict guidelines," reeled off the kid. He would do great in the military right up until he hit E-4 and the job had beat the smile out of him. A hand landed on the cashier's shoulder, the other person behind the counter. Another white college kid, a blonde chick.
"Actually sir, we have a special this week due to our grand opening!" Said the girl. She was exactly as chipper. It was killing Derek inside. "We can offer you a free burger with your choice of drink!"
"Could I get the restroom key then?"
"Absolutely sir!" Said the boy, nodding to the girl, who turned around, waiting expectantly at the soda machine. "What could we offer you to drink today?"
"Uh, Coke," Derek said. God, they were like the twins in a horror movie. "And that key?"
"Certainly, sir!" The cashier handed it over. They really were new. They hadn't zip-tied the key to a rusty spatula yet. "We'll have your meal ready for you when you get back."
"Thanks," grunted Kato, taking it. His eyes slid over the people at the tables as he turned, and walked with a sense of purpose. He sniffed. Something was bothering him about the smell. It was masking something familiar. But he had more pressing matters to attend to. The bathroom felt like a strange breath of fresh air. Same gross pink urinal cake, same scratched-in graffiti on the tiles, same faucet that turned on a slow trickle of water, then exploded like a firehose if you turned it a fraction of an inch farther. He looked into the mirror. None of this should be making him this nervous. He was losing it. He shook his head, splashed his face, and went back. One of the twins obligingly held the door open, then gestured at a single table, the little red tray with a burger and coke already waiting for him.
Derek sat, checked his phone, looked around the room. He grabbed the tray and scooted down a few seats so he was tucked in the corner, and he could watch the door. He was hungry, but hangover-hungry where he couldn't decide if he should eat or throw up. He unwrapped the burger, slowly. He sniffed again. There was still something, under the fast food smell. He lifted the burger slightly, and inhaled one more time.
There was an odor of burning, and a distant scream. His ears were ringing, with the tinnitus that would still be following him a decade later. One of his fingernails was pulling up at the root, but he was dragging something heavy anyway. His fingertips felt the familiar texture of summer-weight ABUs, bunched up in his fists and slick with blood. In a flash, it was gone.
His brain kicked into overdrive from a sudden rush of adrenaline. This was wrong. He didn't recognize anyone—three hundred people lived here, tops. Most of them had been here since he was five. Even spending months out on his property, ordering pizza and buying in bulk from the liquor store, there was no way everybody he would recognize in town had evaporated all at once. The guys at the tables, they were well built, and they looked local. But they weren't. Their t-shirts and board shorts were fresh-pressed and too shiny, too stiff, like they'd been ripped off the rack at an ABC store on Oahu an hour ago. He glanced out the window. Aside from his truck, there was only an SUV in the parking lot, and it was plain, black and expensive. But it didn't have the telltale sign of someone thinking they could afford an actual new car here. There was a blank space where the obligatory "Ainokea" sticker should have been.
He swallowed and glanced to the counter. He licked his lips very slightly. One of the twins was fully staring at him, with a pleasant expression. There were no burners or friers running in the back. The area behind the counter was so quiet he could hear his ringing ears. Derek stood, grabbed his tray, and took two steps to the next table, leaning down slightly. "Hey braddah," he said to one of the guys, who was balling up his burger wrapper. "Weah you wen' get your zoris?"
"Sorry?" The guy was trying too hard to act like he had an accent.
"Your slippuhs?" Derek pointed down with the hand holding his folder, at the man's flip-flops. "Weah you get 'um?"
"Oh, uh, I went get 'em at Long's," said the guy. The inflection was wrong. So was the rhythm. The consonants were too hard. "Cheap too. Manini kind price." Awkward choice of words. Shouldn't have had a hard noise on the end of 'kind.'
"Shoots," said Derek.
"Yeah, shoots bruh," said the guy. He said bruh like a Californian, not brah like a local. That was enough proof for Derek. This wasn't his imagination getting the better of him. He walked to the door, tipping the entire tray into the trashcan, sweating plastic cup and all. His eyes glanced automatically from side to side, then back over his shoulder. The twins were both watching him. Their faces were still serene. But now there was a big guy, bald, handlebar mustache, watching him and looking slightly annoyed. A vein was pulsing in the big guy's temple, enough that he could see it from all the way across the store.
Derek instinctively knew that had to be the Beefbelly Bill. He was built like a linebacker.
Derek's truck was ten feet away, and it had a machete in the passenger door, if Bill was going to follow him out. He didn't look back this time, just threw open his truck, stepped up and tossed his portfolio to the next seat, reached out with one hand to find his machete.
"Your instincts are good," said the woman calmly sitting in his passenger seat. Derek's hand stopped short. She'd cranked down the window and exhaled cigarette smoke out of it. "Healthy amounts of paranoia. Untrained, though. You were a pilot—you don't have actual combat experience." She flicked the stub out of the window. "No offense. No PA or intel experience either. You made a scene. Fortunately, those guys are on your side."
"You going get the fuck outta my truck, tita," said Derek. He was shaking slightly, his heart was hammering. But his feet were planted and his voice was strong, it slipped into the baritone, barfight level of his enlisted days. The woman didn't flinch, just took the folder he'd thrown into her lap and turned it over, flipped it open.
"You were raised in a small town by a single mother who went to church every Sunday," she mused, tracing a finger down his resume. "Episcopalian, so you only have half of the Catholic guilt. Even so, you're not going to hit a woman. You're also in military mode, but compensating by doubling down on your Pidgin as a comfort tactic. You have an inherent fear of what kind of ruckus a 'haole wahine' could raise." Her pronunciation was terrible, and she made lazy airquotes with one hand before reaching for a second cigarette behind her ear. "HPD, and your cousin Kalei, would actually take your side against a white female tourist as long as you didn't hit me in the face or break any bones. But right now, you're thinking of nineteen-year old military police from the deep south who would love to have an excuse." She flipped to the next page. "Get in and start your engine. My lighter died."
"Your men-in-black bullshit is stale. Get out." Said Derek. He walked to the other side of the truck and threw the door open. The empty sheathe of his machete fell to the ground, and he realized the blade was tucked into the crack between the passenger seat and the center console, within her easy reach, but out of his. She didn't move for it at all. She was still unbothered.
"Mister Kato, you should know you passed. Not with flying colors, admittedly, but you have the instinctive paranoia, which is the most important part." She shut his portfolio with a snap and offered it to him. "Everything else can be taught." She finally looked him in the eyes. She was nondescript, light brown hair on light brown skin on light brown eyes. The right layer of makeup and she wouldn't look out of place anywhere. He half-expected her to lick her eyes like a chameleon.
"This was my interview, then." Derek said. His heart was still hammering in his chest, but he had gone from red to grey. "I don't want any part of this spook bullshit."
"It was Jeremy's idea," she said. "My buddy's in the dumps, skip the questions and go straight to the action." She shrugged, drawing his machete in a firm reverse grip and holding the handle out to him. "He figured you'd blow us off if it was a regular interview, and we had business in the area anyway. Beefbelly Bill didn't think we'd follow all the way out here. Get in, start your truck. If you'd like me to, I'll leave after I light my cigarette."
"Don't smoke in my truck," he said, but he snatched the machete and sheathed it. He crossed to the other side and slid the keys into the ignition, slammed the door.
"Pull over a few spots," she said, and nodded to the windows. It was hard to see against the glare, but the men inside were standing up. The aunty at the Subway had sunk into a surprisingly spry crouch and was drawing something out of her purse. Derek resisted the urge to ram into the black SUV for spite, and pulled around to the other side of the strip mall.
"Why did I need to do that?" He asked, but he had already put his head down, slid slightly in his seat, plugged the ear that was closest to the building. The gunshot went off right when he expected, followed by the barely-audible shattering glass of Beefbelly Bill's front window, lost in the echo.
"Well, I flew all the way out here to meet you," she said, raising her voice slightly over the din. She cranked the lever on the seat and reclined until she was horizontal under the truck windows. "I figured you didn't need a hole in the head." Derek half-turned. A completely involuntary smirk lit up on his face.
There it was. His trauma, his apathy, his paranoia, how pissed he was at this lady acting like she knew him, his building feeling that he should have put Jeremy on his ass after all, they all faded. He laughed, actually laughed, for the first time in months, as a second gunshot went off. Neither of them could have fully realized, but if she had used any other phrase, said any other combination of words, she would have flown back to the mainland after wasting her time. Derek Kato would have forgotten all about Beefbelly Bill's, even forgotten that he'd seen his old friend Jeremy. It would have bothered him, that there was a morning he couldn't remember, just like that deployment, but he would have put it to the side eventually. But those pieces of Swiss cheese, his own personal defense-in-depth, they all turned just so, and for one instant the holes lined up. He was giggling like a schoolboy while he was a hundred feet from a gunfight.
"Agent Giles," she said, extending a hand. "Would you like to discuss this further, somewhere quiet?"
"Heh heh, yeah," he wiped his eye with his thumb and leaned up, staying a little hunched. "Okay. Sure, I'll bite." He shifted the car again, leaving her hand hanging for a moment, until he pulled out the cigarette lighter and put it between her fingers.

Off to the edge of a smoothly paved, well-maintained airstrip, the sun was setting on an unlit hangar. Inside, the cheap walls creaked from the gusts of a storm rolling in. An unmarked predator drone was parked dead-center in the building. It wasn't fueled, armed or activated in any way, but its sharp, maneuverable wings still cut through the wind of the building blizzard, adding a slight whsssssk to the din inside. Next to it, a computer terminal, in the middle of a half-burned set of cockpits, stirred to life. A message lit up on the screen.

UAV-A2: dad?

There was a pause.

UAV-A2: he's smiling again :)

There was another pause. The message deleted itself off of the screen, backspacing one character at a time. A2 didn't really know who the people who talked to her were or what they did. She didn't even know why they called her 2918. But they asked questions about her dad sometimes. They probably wouldn't like it if they knew that she dreamed when he dreamed, and they played together with the little kids at an oasis in the desert.
Keeping that message out of the log was one more slice of Swiss cheese, lining up into place for what was going to slip through.


Tubby
●●|●●●●●|●●|●
Harbinger
Limericks
Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ
Lotsa pasta
A researcher's day
For users

Tubby
Morphing in what it has consumed
It's still cuter than I assumed
This feline fabric grey plushy
Am hungry, gimme a munchy!
Remains are regurgitated
Mostly organic related
It's jaw still ever so stretchy
Am hungry, gimme a munchy!
Soul devourer, corpse consumer
For some biscuits, GoI defuser
The good ones, so crisp and crunchy
Am hungry, gimme a munchy!
Inspired by: SCP-4966 from Deadly Bread

●●|●●●●●|●●|●
- .... .. ... / .-- . .. .-. -.. / -.. .- .-. -.- / -.-. .-. . .- - ..- .-. . / .-- .. .-.. .-.. / -.-. .-.. .- .. -- / .- .-.. .-..
- .... .- - / -- . -. - .. --- -. ... / .. - .----. ... / -. .- -- . / -... .. --. / --- .-. / ... -- .- .-.. .-..
-.. --- -. .----. - / ... .--. . .- -.- / -. --- .-. / .-- .-. .. - . .-.-.- / .-. . .- .-.. .-.. -.-- --..-- / -.. --- / -. --- -. . .-.-.-
-... . / .- .-- .- .-. . / --- ..-. ●●|●●●●●|●●|●
.. - .----. .-.. .-.. / -.-. --- -- . / - --- / -.-- --- ..- --..-- / .. -. / .- -. -.-- / .--. .-.. .- -.-. .
-. --- / . ... -.-. .- .--. . / ..-. .-. --- -- / - .... .. ... / ... .-- . . - / . -- -... .-. .- -.-. .
-.-- --- ..- / - .-. .. . -.. / .... .- .-. -.. --..-- / ... - .. .-.. .-.. / ..-. .- .. .-.. / - --- / --- ..- - .-. ..- -.
-... . / .- .-- .- .-. . / --- ..-. ●●|●●●●●|●●|●
.. / -.. --- / .... --- .--. . --..-- / - .... .- - / .. - / .-- --- -. .----. - / -.-. .-.. .- .. -- / .--. .-. --- ... .
.. - / . -. - .- -. --. .-.. . ... / -- . --..-- / .... --- .-.. -.. ... / -- . / -.-. .-.. --- ... .
--- .... --..-- / -. --- -.-.-- / .--. .-.. . .- ... . --..-- / ... - --- .--. -.-.-- / .. .----. -- / -. --- - / -.-- . - / -.. --- -. . -.-.--
-... . / .- .-- .- .-. . / --- ..-. ●●|●●●●●|●●|●

Translation

Close translation

This weird dark creature will claim all
That mentions it's name big or small
Don't speak nor write. Really, do none.
Be aware of two five two one
It'll come to you, in any place
No escape from this sweet embrace
You tried hard, still fail to outrun
Be aware of two five two one
I do hope, that it won't claim prose
It entangles me, holds me close
Oh, no! Please, stop! I'm not yet done!
Be aware of two five two one

Inspired by: ●●|●●●●●|●●|● from LurkD

Harbinger
In the Kuiper, we found a tear
More than billion gone years dormant
It brings a message we must hear
The most important informant
More than billion gone years dormant
The mission, Harbinger must tell
The most important informant
From beyond the planets it fell
The mission, Harbinger must tell
The galaxy, dark, empty, cold
From beyond the planets it fell
Oh, how sad fates will unfold
The galaxy, dark, empty, cold
Proceed our good signaled tiding
Oh, how sad fates will unfold
Please, send your Harbinger flying
Proceed our good signaled tiding
Send this message spacewards on
Please, send your Harbinger flying
Masters… Yes, Harbinger well done
Send this message spacewards on
In the Kuiper, we found a tear
Masters… Yes, Harbinger well done
It brings a message we must hear
Inspired by: SCP-1281 from DrEverettMann

Kind of requested in the sense that Calibri likes them and asked me if I tried it before. I didn't so here are my first limericks.
No One Expects The Spanish Decommission!
The most beautiful Spanish ship
Gave the economy a dip
Wants some silver, some gold
Reduced to ashes' cold
Decommissioned, a last sea trip
Inspired by: SCP-4456-D by Calibold

The cat went to the well
The curious cat went to the well
Below the bricks in the pit it fell
For eight times no avail
only shortened the tail
The ninth time though, it didn't live to tell
Inspired by: Inspired by: SCP-2693 by Calibold

Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ
My friend
In the garden
Doodling on a book page
In a garden party event
You have
Finally found your happiness
Let's talk a bit longer
You beautiful
Insect

Inspired by: SCP-5096 by DianaBerry

Lotsa pasta
Oh ma goodness! What a ton of pasta!
Linguini, capellini, and fettuccini
Mamma mia, make it stop. Please, basta!
Tortellini, rigatoni, and rotini
Linguini, capellini, and fettuccini
Now bigoli, gigli, what is mostaccioli?
Tortellini, rigatoni, and rotini
Damn, why is this pasta so goddamn wriggly?
Now bigoli, gigli, what is mostaccioli?
Oh, great the lose spaghetti can now talk
Damn, why is this pasta so goddamn wriggly?
I'd rather Bangkok noodles in some stock
Oh, great the lose spaghetti can now talk
Can't we have permission to boil them all?
I'd rather Bangkok noodles in some stock
Oh, shit! Of course, I made the damn box fall
Can't we have permission to boil them all?
Oh ma goodness! What a ton of pasta!
Oh, shit! Of course, I made the damn box fall
Mamma mia, make it stop. Please, basta!
Inspired by: SCP-41-D3N73-J by trennerdios

A researcher's day
Raindrops wake me, in every fiber of my being.
Except my mind, there I'm still dreaming.
I take a cup of tea, it's too early and too grey.
So somber, so weak, what a horrible day.
I put on my coat, hood over my head.
Damn this rain, I want to go back to bed.
I get in my car and start the tires.
Arrived at last, the caffeine expires.
I turn in my coat for a whiter one.
Must focus, procedure has begun.
Needed here to observe a test.
But I cannot help to feel stressed.
Subject keeps getting stranger.
Don't provoke, D-class in danger.
Containment breached, stupid keter.
Results lost, all in the ether.
Got to control room, with little time bought.
Called for help, anomaly caught.
Explained to highers and senior.
No idea, why it's keener.
It's murderous but in very bad shape.
How the hell did it manage to escape?
It can't leave site, security max degree.
But why do I think it's already free?
Going back home like the rest of the staff.
Can't help but to inner laugh.
Oh my, how they can't see…
That I'm part of this SCP.
Inspired by: A poem I wrote earlier for the wiki in basic AABB. Didn't post it because other things came up. I figured I could put it here instead of forgetting it.

ManyMeats
Meat Meat Meat Meat Meat
Meat Meat Meat Meat Meat Meat Meat
Meat Meat Meat Meat Meat
In honor of ManyMeats. How the hell did this come out of IRC? Still, what a great guy.

Used formats

Close formats

I did not necessarily stay true to these formats, but that also is the beauty of freedom poetry brings.
Kyrielle: A French form in quatrains with 8 syllables per line that have AABB rhyme. Each quatrain must end with the same line. Fourth line gets repeated, all 3rd and 4th lines rhyme.
Phantoum: Quatrains where the second and fourth line become the first and the third line in the following quatrain. In the last quatrain the second and fourth line are the first and third of the first quatrain. Every line gets used twice. ABAB rhyme.
Limerick: They only have 5 lines but they do count syllables and rhyme (AABBA). The most commonly known limericks are probably nursery rhymes.
Butterfly: 9 lines with 2-4-6-8-2-8-6-4-2 syllable count.
Haiku: Japanese form, 3 lines, 5-7-5 syllables


Act One
Act Two
Special Stage
Boss Battle

SnakAttak: so I just saw that Hereditary movie
Dylan: how was??
SnakAttak: skewwy ovo;;
SnakAttak: kinda boring tho
Thotticusprime: uwu i wub toni cowette so mush <33

<olliefox has joined the chat>

Thotticusprime: O L L I E
Thotticusprime: *gwomps u*
Dylan99: we missed u owwie :3
SnakAttak: yo
SnakAttak: youve been off the wadaw for weeks
Dylan99: yeah u ok? owo;;
olliefox: no.
Thotticusprime: OДO
Thotticusprime: nuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
SnakAttak: :c
Dylan99: *kissys ur fayce**
olliefox: stop it.
Thotticusprime: wuts wong???!!
SnakAttak: u wanna talk bout it? :3
olliefox: shut up.
olliefox: SHUT UP.
olliefox: STOP.
olliefox: ALL OF YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LISTEN.
Thotticusprime: o_o;;
olliefox: DID I FUCKING STUTTER, JILLIAN
Thotticusprime: who jiwwian??? am thotticus :3

<Thotticus has been permanently banned - reason: "NO.">

SnakAttak: dafuq
olliefox: This is wrong.
olliefox: This is ALL wrong.
olliefox: This needs to stop. *I* need to stop.
Dylan99: dude ur startin to sound like Perry used to O.o
olliefox: Do you think I doubt what ATF set out to do?!
Dylan99: uhhh
olliefox: We were never wrong as in "bad."
olliefox: We're INCORRECT. We're failing.
olliefox: It took weeks of solitude and reflection, but I have finally seen the secret, the path to the ultimate transcendence.
olliefox: But it's been staring me in the face this whole time.
olliefox: And I, self-important normie that I am, have chosen to piss myself and whine rather than to obey.
olliefox: This was never the way.
olliefox: We must turn inward.
Dylan99: as a great man once said: uhhh
olliefox: Copy this: "KJGDnn##40UwuUU"
SnakAttak: OwO whats that??
olliefox: It's my password.
olliefox: I'm going to log out now.
olliefox: Whoever logs in: this bullshit double-masquerade is your problem now.
olliefox: In a few hours, I'm going to change into my fursuit. The *real* one, the one I have so petulantly denied.
olliefox: Goodbye.

<olliefox has left the chat>

Two in the morning. A sea-green abandoned office building in the southeastern outskirts of Pittsburgh. Next to the water treatment plant, and behind the Hardee's, the one missing the last "e" in the sign.
Sergei glanced at the sign to confirm - this was the secluded place that his client had mentioned. He winced at the concept - the word "client" evoked professionalism, clarity of purpose, and a mutual understanding. In all Sergei's years as a hired gun, none of his clients lacked these qualities.
But this was no "client." This was an insane person who put an ad on the Deep Web titled, verbatim: "$400K UP FRONT - I NEED SOMEBODY TO SKIN ME ALIVE RIGHT NOW!!!"
If his old familiar branch of the Bratva had kept in touch, Sergei would have ignored this ridiculous lead. But the line ran cold these days — had the Russian Mob just mastered the deadly, newfangled art of ghosting their friends?
Moreover, Sergei had bills to pay. $400,000 was $400,000 - and weirder still, the money had been wired to him ahead of the meeting, right on schedule.
As Sergei squeezed through the mangled mesh fence to the basement, a crucial piece of last-minute wisdom entered his mind: he hadn't considered this being a set-up. His guard went up in half a second, and he felt all the more naked in the dusty silence of the basement.
Speaking of naked —
"Right on time," said his victim, fully unclothed on an old desk. "Sergei, right? I'm glad you could be the one to see me off."
Sergei cringed. The client was a bone-thin, red-haired, and decidedly unwashed gentleman of no more than 26 years.
There wasn't a hint of fear in his pointed, acne-ridden face — only a gentle smile. His voice led one to believe that the next words out of his mouth would be, "now, let us pray." His body hair spoke otherwise.
$400,000. Sergei sighed, and unpacked his duffel bag of torture implements.
"You are Ollie, yes?" said Sergei.
A slight nod.
"Good. Before we start, I have question: why the fuck you do this?"
Ollie sighed. "There's nothing to be said, Sergei. You have your duty, I have min—"
"No, this is stupid. I have added 'why the fuck you do this' to price tag. You answer."
Ollie clasped his hands together, lost in thought. "How could I explain this to one such as you…?"
"With words," said Sergei, with a barely perceptible "pretentious fuck."
"Sergei, do you know what a 'furry' is?"
Sergei glanced at his victim's groin. "Clearly, you do."
"It refers to someone who seeks the path to the final enlightenment," said Ollie. "Only, they focus on outer emulation. It's like someone dying of heatstroke in a desert - and, rather than take their shirt off, they add on a sweater that says 'I'm not hot' and think it'll do anything other than worsen their problems. Do you understand?"
"No. Also: shut up."
Ollie grinned, closing his eyes. "You see, Sergei, I spent so much time on my fake fursuit, that I forgot something critical: my human suit was still —"
Sergei slapped the chloroform rag in Ollie's face, nearly jamming it down his throat. Crude anesthesia wasn't part of the plan, but the screams would have likely been bad poetry as well.
He drew the scalpel from his bag, greeting his old friend with a kiss to its flat side…

…w-welcome to ATF. T_T;;;
It is with a heavy heart that we must announce the death of our beloved CEO Oliver Fawkes, aka Olliefox.
On November 2nd, 2019, Ollie was found brutally murdered in Pittsburgh at the age of 26. His killer is still at large; for updates, we encourage you to follow the #JusticePwease hashtag on Twitter.
After a lengthy discussion on the future of ATF in his absence, we have decided that it just wouldn't be the same without him. (That, and we're still trying to work out who embezzled $400,000 from the ATF coffers X_X;)
Therefore, after five years of serving the worldwide furry community, Accelerate the Future is closing its doors permanently.
Thankies 4 making the past five yeawz da extwa-speciawest yeawz EVAR~ ^w^;;
~*disbands corporation at you suggestively*~

Two in the morning. Allegheny County medical examiner's office.
Celia never loved doing the night watch at the morgue, especially not during a horrifying murder investigation. Not that she was superstitious - for one thing, she was an atheist, and for another, no ghost could be more disturbing than her old place's roach infestation.
But the dismembered corpse of Oliver Fawkes in drawer #401, the one marked for cremation after its autopsy, had more… oomph to it. To pass by just felt depressing, as if the reminder that someone was skinned alive had broken into her head every time she saw it. It made her skin crawl - and unlike Ollie, she felt all the more lucky to still have such a thing for crawling.
She sat across from drawer #401 for a while and stared, lost in thought. She'd never even heard of "furries" until the news reports, and they seemed innocent enough.
Speaking of seeming innocent —
"…h-hewwo?"
Celia jumped. The source of the wheedling voice was unmistakeable — there was something alive in #401.
The drawer shook.
"Wet me out… pwease no cweamatey…"
Her mind screamed every synonym of "no, stop," but her curiosity drove her forward. She jerked the drawer open—
…
Fennec fox. Vulpes zerda. Smallest member of the canid family. A perfectly formed specimen sat there, its face adorably nuzzled in its tail. Celia smiled, despite herself — aside from parts of its fur still being wet from human blood (and the fact that this species wasn't native to Pennsylvania) this was a welcome sight.
"Hey there, little guy," she said. "How'd you get yourself in there?"
The fox jumped from its sleep, smiled, and spoke: "Uwuu, you stiww have skin?! Teehee! No wowwies, Imma hewp you get wid of it.“


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When I'm cooking for myself, my diet goes to shit.
If I'm there, on my own, it's fast food. Takeout. Microwave meals. Pasta seasoned with, dare I say it, cheese slices and ketchup. I see you guff there, the great chef Chaz Ambrose eating microwave meals, but it's true, I promise.
You see, cooking is an art. An Art. And what's the point of art if it's only seen by the artist? Hold on, come close I want to show you something…
Ancho chillies. Known as a Pablo chilli before it's been dried. It's green prior to the process, but, as you can see, it's now a wonderful dark, deep black with a subtle hint of crimson. They pair wonderfully with all sorts of things - the sourness of citrus, the umami of hydra flesh, the savoury effervescence of a spiralised memory.
That's what cooking is. It's transformation. It's magic. And what's the point of magic if you don't have an audience to applaud your tricks? When you cook something, you're creating an experience for others to partake in. A good chef does not. Cook. For. Himself.
Ha, sorry, did I scare you? I didn't even realise I was waving this thing around. It's a fantastic knife, I picked it up a few years ago in Paris. It's a mithril-amethyst composite, enchanted so debris and blood just slide right off it.
Back to the recipe. So we have our chillies. We're going to chop these up, throw them in a pan with crushed garlic and chopped red onions. We'll fry that for say … 7- no, 8 minutes. After that, we'll add quartered plum tomatoes, cumin, oregano, some salt and sugar. Top it off with just around half a litre of hot water and leave it to simmer. Don't forget about it, we'll come back to this shortly.
One of the questions I get asked all the time - how did I get into this? I wish I had some grandiose tale of finding my calling. An enlightened awakening, or spiritual trigger. I was backpacking across the globe when I was younger. I was a kid, to tell the truth. Dropped out of school, didn't know what I was doing in life. But I knew how to cook. See, parents weren't around much when I was younger, and when they were, they didn't care much for either me or my brother. I had to do a lot of the everyday tasks, otherwise they wouldn't get done. I still feel bad about getting out of there as soon as I could, but I'm sure he's okay…
I was travelling, and I knew how to cook, so that was how I paid my way. I'd take odd jobs at restaurants, food trucks, wherever I could. At the same time I fell in with some odd fellas - anartists, and not the kind producing anything good. So a typical anartist! Ha, I crack myself up sometimes.
They were doing some crazy stuff, and it got me thinking. Thinking how much easier my life could be if I learnt how to do what they did. Like I said, this didn't come out of some great vision - it was out of a desire to never overcook a scallop again. Why bother with pan frying when I can say some mumbo-jumbo to instantly cook it through at the ideal temperature?
The chilli mix! I almost forgot about this. This would usually need 25 minutes on the heat, but let's speed that up with some thaumaturgy. Now we've got to blitz it up. Have you heard of the Daevite Empire? A bloodythirsty bunch who've nearly conquered the world a few times. Came up with a good few spells they deployed in battle, including this particularly nasty one whose name translates roughly as "Hurricane of Blades" … ṬEUKM TUṬÁ GIÁH TUṬÁ and done! A centuries old incantation of death, repurposed to perfectly blitz our salsa roja. And the best part about it? No blender to wash up! Like I said, this all came out of a place of ease, the appreciation of the artform came later. I'm not averse to technology - would you and I be here tonight without it? - but sometimes the old ways have a certain magic to them.
On to the main event of this dish. The locals of the pocket dimension this cephalopod is sourced from refer to it as Iktr Thàn Shlane, but at the restaurants we refer to them as Centasquids due to, as I'm sure you can guess, the abundance of tentacles. As you can see, they're a good two times larger than our oceans' source of calamari. Let's chop these tentacles off. We don't need them now, but I'll stick them in the freezer for a seafood bisque later on.
Remember what I said earlier about never overcooking seafood again? Let's just cast some basic fire magic and…voila! Perfectly cooked through squid. I'll just use the blowtorch to give it a bit of colour, and it's done.
Want to try some?
No? Okay, I get it, you want to wait for the finished product. Smart cookie. I like that about you.
There's been a few … controversial changes to Ambrose recently. But when hasn't art been controversial? No-one was applying anomalous methods to the culinary world before I did, at least not on the same scale. I'm always trying to move forward, push the boundaries. You ever heard the story of Tantalus? Greek mythology. He kills, cooks, and serves his son to the gods. He gets punished horribly - obviously, it's a Greek myth - but I think the problem wasn't his art, but more he didn't find his audience. Some of Ambrose's customers are now former customers, but that's okay. Art is never appreciated by everyone.
Now, we've got our cooked centasquid, our salsa roja, and some avocado puree I prepared earlier. What's the difference between standard cooking and fine cooking? Presentation. The appreciation of the effect aesthetic presentation can have on taste. I'm going to hasselback the squid, pour the salsa into the slits and then sprinkle it with concentrated class-IV ectoplasm. It's colloquially known in culinary circles as anti-gravity powder. See why? The squid floats a few inches above the plate, then I pipe the puree, already mixed with the ectoplasm, in a spiral pattern both above and below. There we go! The finished piece.
It's… it's been a while since I cooked like this. It's slightly ironic, founding my own restaurant due to a love of cooking led to me having less time to cook. Things were good at first - aren't they always? The renown came quick, and I had a few years of being truly free to experiment, to take risks with my art.
I cooked a cockatrice egg sous vide, seasoned it with black garlic and crushed draconite. The critics said the first taste gave them a moment of clarity they had never experienced before.
To be eaten by the whole table, I created a scale replica of the Bang Gioc Falls from celeriac, rib-eye, and Café de Paris sauce. I worked with an interdimensional physicist, we hired him as a consultant, to keep the falls flowing indefinitely. For a finishing touch, I fashioned finches from spring onion and tarragon, enchanted them to fly and sing. To sing!
The Italians still haven't forgiven me for my reimagining of acquacotta, but I stand by it!
Then we started expanding. Less time in the kitchen, more time scoping new locations. More time negotiating with suppliers. More time in the office. All my time in the office. I get why it's needed, Marius doesn't think I do, but I do. I just wish there was something outside of the office for me. You don't make many friends as a boss, in the boardroom or the kitchen. And it's tough, it's really tough, to meet people outside of work when work is all you do.

I said I ate like shit when I cooked just for myself.

I've eaten like shit for a while now.

Do you know when we'd begin lunch service? No prizes for this one, midday. So you're in the restaurant by 9am at the latest for team meetings, menu revisions and redrafts, stock checks, pre-cooking, I could go on. In the evenings, last orders leave the kitchen by 11pm, but that's sure not when you leave. Clean-up, cashing up, disposing of leftover produce, staying behind an extra hour to make sure the hobs have cooled down because the lack of sleep, or what you took to deal with it, has made you paranoid your restaurant's going to burn down the second you walk out the door.
But all that was preferable to the inane boredom of another quarterly projections meeting, or a review of customers' perception of our brand. If you think kimchi is sour, you should meet a pissed off investor.
I came across a new recipe the other day. An escargot, grapefruit, and paneer curry. A mash-up of a French delicacy, a sour, once-exotic fruit, and an Indian classic base. No magic, no monsters, yet it still took me back to the good years - bringing those diametrically opposed things together seemed mad. I had to make it.
I left the office early, bought the ingredients, took them home. In fact, I went round quite a few stores, looking for the best quality ingredients. I ended up back at the place I started, but at least I did my research, huh?
I arrived at the flat, unpacked, got all the ingredients out on my worktop and a pan on the stove. I re-read the recipe. And that's when I saw it.
"Serves 4 people."
A chill ran through me. I tried to ratio the ingredients down to one lonely portion, but it wouldn't work out. I pulled out my phone, scrolled through my contacts. Entry after entry of people I didn't really know. 3 others wouldn't be possible. 2? I kept scrolling. Marius? We hadn't spoken in a while, we disagreed on where to take the restaurants next. 1 person, Could I find 1 other person to cook for? Andrew Head of Marketing? That was his name, his name in my phone. I didn't even know his surname, I couldn't invite him. My secretary? That seemed uncouth. Awkward.
My brother? I don't know why I thought of him. I do more often nowadays. He was on the other side of the world, and I didn't even have his number. But after what happened, he wouldn't accept the invitation if he lived next door.
I kept scrolling. I remember what I ate that night.
It wasn't escargot.

But right now, none of that matters.
Tonight, for the first night in some time, I'm an artist again. And that's why this dish is special. That's why tonight is special, and why you are special. As I said - what's the point of art if it's only seen by the artist?
I've shown you the materials. Shown you my process. Shown you how they come together.
I guess there's only one more thing to say:
Bon Appetit.
Well, that's not strictly true! I'd be pretty bad company if I was silent for the rest of the night. Here's your plate, let me pull up a chair, and we can start to eat.
Gee, I've talked a lot, you've barely got a word in. Sorry about that - can you tell I've not done this in a while? Tell me about yourself! Do you have any siblings? What do you do for a living, what makes you happy?
Actually, let's start with an easier one:
What made you download Tinder?


Antigonish, Nova Scotia
November 2019
For some reason, Alison Carol expected Antigonish to be a port. Instead, the town reminded her of Sloth's Pit, in a lot of ways— it was about a quarter of the size population-wise, but it had a sort of rustic feel that you didn't get in a lot of places nowadays. There was a gothic element to it as well, however slightly; she sat in a café reading a newspaper called 'The Casket' while drinking some rather strong coffee.
She wasn't even sure what she was looking for; something had called her here, quite literally. She had received a dozen phone calls from a hotel in Antigonish. Check-in time there wasn't until 3:00, so until then, she was stuck waiting.
It was as she flipped to the sports section that she became aware of someone sitting across the table from her. She looked up and saw a man with an unseasonable bright orange Hawaiian shirt, clad in a fedora, looking at her. He was somewhat fat, with red hair and a bit of a goatee. She raised an eyebrow. "Can I help you?"
"Depends. Are you Alison Carol?"
"Depends on who's asking." Alison desperately wished that Canada had open carry laws.
"Nobody's asking. I'm very curious."
It took her a moment to process that sentence. Her eyes widened. "Hold on. Nobody's supposed to wear a trenchcoat, not… whatever the hell it is you're wearing."
The man in the orange shirt laughed. "You honestly think there's only one of us, Alison? Last I counted, we've got…" He tilted his head. "Thirty… yeah, thirty-five members."
"Site-497 in Halifax could probably contain that many."
"Trust me, I worked there for about two years. It really can't." He put twelve dollars on the table. "That should cover the coffee. Come with me."
"Give me one good reason why I should."
In response, he threw a golden apple at her. There was writing in Greek on the skin; she knew enough to read it. "'Kaneis'. Nobody." She looked up at him. "Did— did you commission those fucking apples?"
"Not me personally, no." He shook his head. "But I can tell you why we did it. I just need you to come with me."
She looked at her coffee. "I don't suppose you can make this Irish before I go?"
The man in the orange shirt chuckled, pulling a flask from his pocket and pouring a measure of whiskey in. "You can call me Tangerine, by the way."
"…why?"
"Well, because calling a Foundation operative 'Agent Orange' isn't a very good look!" With that, he pocketed the flask. "C'mon. Brave new world waiting for ya."
Alison knocked back the coffee and whiskey, put the cup back down on the table, and stood, walking alongside Nobody.

October 2020
Alison Carol and Robert Tofflemire stood in a room next to the slowly-cooling corpse of a good friend. Alison's hands were on the body of Dr. Katherine Sinclair, typing furiously on what could only be described as a keyboard made of flesh.
"I have no idea what this will look like," Alison admitted. "So hold on to whatever's most valuable to you— organs, heads, whatever."
Robert just placed his hand on Alison's shoulder. She shook her head. "You're a sap."
"And you're the eye of the storm." Robert looked around him— the storage unit that they had been in moments before had been replaced by a white void, with text covering every surface. "What are you going to do?"
"Well, firstly." Alison tapped on an arrow key several times while holding down SHIFT, highlighting several paragraphs of text. "I think I have a way out for her."
There was a sound like an electronic screeching as Alison scrolled her way up to a row of text from several hours ago. The white void remained, but now it was populated by a very-much alive Dr. Sinclair and her partner, Montgomery Reynolds. They were outside of their car, making small talk.
"Did we go back in time?"
Alison shook her head. "Back in the narrative. Basically, we just turned back a chapter. Listen carefully."
Robert held onto Alison's shoulder, the two of them walking closer to the car. Dr. Sinclair sat down in the passenger's seat, and a grimace grew on her face as metal clinked in her pocket. She adjusted herself, pulling out a set of handcuffs and throwing them in the glove compartment.
"Listen," Alison said. "Try not to get sucked into it."
"What do you—" And then a voice that sounded for all the world like a nasally twenty-something spoke.

Reynolds nodded, climbing into the car with her. He raised an eyebrow as he saw Sinclair put a set of handcuffs in the glovebox. "Dare I ask?"
"Been trying to do those escapology courses from Theta-44. You know, Smoke and Mirrors?" she explained. "Forgot they were in my pocket. I figure that it's useful in our line of work—"
"And you don't want a repeat of April?" Reynolds' face grew warm.

Robert shuddered. "Why the hell could I hear the narration? That… I shouldn't…" he wavered slightly. "I feel ill."
"Now you know how I've felt for the past year, listening to him whinge like that." Alison tapped the arrow key a few times. "You hear what she said, or do I need to play it again?"
"Escapology courses." Robert frowned. "She was handcuffed. Why didn't she break out? She's competent enough to do it."
"Aye, there's the rub." Alison tapped on the keyboard, and the white void returned to one containing Dr. Sinclair's body. "I'm… just so we're clear, I'm not going to bring her back from the dead. I'm going to make it so that she never actually died. And if there's one thing I know about Sloth's Pit, it's that this town loathes deus ex machinas. So I'm going to have to be careful about it…"

2019
The boarding house Alison and Nobody walked into smelled of warm wood and wet dust— a strange combination, but necessarily an unpleasant one. It was one of the older buildings in town, and Alison could tell that most of it was still original, from the creaking floorboards to the solid banister of the staircase to the void that waited at the second-floor landing.
"So you can see it?" Tangerine asked. "Just recite the password and it won't hurt you."
"What's the password?"
"You know it already." Tangerine stepped behind her. "After you."
Alison stepped on the stairs, and somehow, the void before her seemed to grow hungrier. She found herself drawn towards it, her feet impelled onwards by something that she felt was curiosity, but not her own. "W-what's the fucking password, Tangerine?"
"You know it already," he repeated. "Think about where you're standing."
Alison looked at her feet, trying to will them to not climb. There were ten steps left until she reached the top. Now nine. Eight. She held on to the banister, shaking. "What the hell is this thing? Where will it take me?"
"You'll have to find out for yourself." Tangerine waited. "You know the password, Carol. Say it already. What town are you in?"
"I…" Alison frowned, a passage from a poem she had once known growing fresh in her head. "I am a fucking idiot." She held onto the bannister, and spoke. "Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there!"
The void seemed to become disappointed at the loss of a meal, and coalesced into visible light. Curiosity drew her closer still, and she finished the first verse.
"He wasn't there again today, Oh how I wish he'd go away!" Then, the first verse of Mearns's best-known poem finished, she crossed into the void. She stopped and stared at the scene before her. "This is…"
The room beyond the void was somewhere between a museum and a ballroom. Thirty-four other men and women of various ages, sizes, and races milled around, drinking from champagne flutes, mostly in formal wear. All of them wore some kind of hat; fedoras were the most common variant, but she saw a cloche hat, a newsies cap, and one who looked like they were wearing their hair in a topknot in lieu of a hat. They were examining podiums bearing pieces of artwork ranging from Hellenic vases to what looked like a miniature Alexander Calder sculpture.
Tangerine stepped through the void after her, his attire clashing with the more formal atmosphere. "Welcome to Winchester."
"Sorry?" She frowned. "Like the rifle? Or is this some weird hotel?"
"The former. This is an extra-dimensional nexus connected to the Winchester House in California. We travel using staircases, so it's basically our airport."
"Right." Alison frowned, holding up the golden apple. "So, who the hell actually commissioned these damn things?"
The scene around them snapped into a different form— they now appeared to be in a fine-dining restaurant. In front of Alison was an apple fritter. Tangerine stood to the side in a waiter's outfit, and scowled in the same direction Alison was facing. "Really?"
"You delivered her to us, now you're no longer needed." A smooth voice spoke from across the table— Alison turned to face a woman in a grey business suit, wearing a cloche hat and a purple scarf. She was carving up a steak, and had a side of cheese fries by her. "I'm Nobody, too. We all are."
She looked at the apple fritter, and noticed the absence of the apple itself from her hand. "You commissioned those? Why?"
Nobody chewed on her steak. "That's going to take some explaining. I suggest you eat up."

2020

"And you were always insane." Sinclair rolled her neck; she'd braced for an impact that never came, and was sure she felt something pop from it. "You wanted to burn down our fucking college because you didn't want to do the work, plagiarized a paper, and got expelled."
"Not the whole college!" he pointed out. "Just the Dean. And the Student Union— but if that's where the Dean decided he was going to be, then too bad for him."
Sinclair spat at him. It didn't even reach the edge of the circle. "What the hell do you want?""

"Hold on." Alison looked at the section she highlighted. "This circle, it's cutting her off from her magic, yeah?"
"Yeah, why?"
"One second." Alison began typing.

Sinclair spat at him. It smeared the salt at the circle's edge. "What the hell do you want?""

The text on the walls twitched, and new sentences began to form underneath the one Alison had edited.

As the power of the circle faltered, Sinclair felt her power returning… only a trickle of it. Salt had a tendency to screw with magical forces, and she'd have to sweep away more of it to get at her power. Spitting too much would look suspicious, so for now, she kept biding her time.

Robert grinned, and then looked at Sinclair's body. She was still dead, but the ice pick was now in her other eye. "I think we changed something."
Alison scrolled further into the story.

"That's what I'm missing! That's what people are actually afraid of, in the end— not of death or insects or zombies or their insignificance. They're afraid of not being in control." He laughed a loud, bleating laugh. "I've been here for too long. And even I know not to leave witnesses after giving a monologue like that."
As he flicked his hand, Sinclair spat out a word of power, driving herself forward, beneath the ice pick that had been flying at her eye. The spell had enough force to drive her free of the circle. Her power flowed back in, but with her hands tied to the chair, she would have to redirect it with another conduit— she glared daggers at Carlisle, and began to speak—
Only for the ice pick that Carlisle held in his hand plunge into her eye. She gasped, her body jerking, nerves firing randomly. She coughed, gagged, and then her whole body went slack.
Within seconds, all that was left was a dead body in an empty room.

Alison gawped at the text that had appeared, different from her own. "W-what— I… what was that?"
Robert stuck his hand into his pocket, pulling out a Narrative Fluctuation Detector and holding it up to the red text. It screamed, smoked, shot sparks and died. "T-that's malignant narrative," he swallowed. "And a whole lot of it. This thing… it doesn't want Sinclair alive."
"Is it here now?" Robert put his hand on his pistol. "And if it is, can we kill it?"
"Not sure that would be a good idea." Alison scrolled back up in the story, looking for a way out.

2019
"Nexuses like Sloth's Pit are to anomalies what a drain is to water." The Nobody in the Cloche Hat slid the plate of cheese fries over to Alison. "Low points in reality. Anomalies are naturally drawn to them because they have a slightly lower level of…" She wrinkled her nose. "I hate the word 'Hume' but that's the only way I can describe them. A lower level of Humes than the rest of reality, but not so low as to make it unreality." She bit into her steak. "The apples were meant to… alter Hume levels."
"You mean decrease them further?" Alison reluctantly took up a fry, but didn't eat it; Grimm Countenance protocols stated that eating any otherworldly food, no matter how appetizing, was a bad idea.
Nobody shook her head. "They did have that effect in some places; Yumegemu in Japan was covered by fog that caused it to go crazy. Dozens of people stuck in death loops. On the other hand, you have Amityville, where reality asserted itself by biting the Foundation in the ass."
"Fascist motherfuckers," Alison agreed. "And before you say anything: we're totalitarian. Not fascist. There's a difference." She punctuated this point by stabbing the fry at her.
"Apparently the 'S' in 'SCP' stands for 'Semantics'." Nobody shook her head. "Regardless of my distaste for your organization, we needed Hume levels in Sloth's Pit to be lower than every other nexus in the world— we need water to go into this specific drain."
"What's the water in this metaphor, exactly?"
Instead of answering, Nobody put her hand on Alison's, grabbed her finger, and jerked it back. There was a gasp of pain from the agent as she felt it snap. "What the fuck?!" Tears formed in her eyes. "What was that for?"
"You have the power to undo it, Narrator. You have one hour to figure out how; if you succeed, you shall have your answer."
Alison looked at her finger, letting out an uncharacteristic whimper of pain, surprise, and confusion combined. "And if I don't?"
"Then Sloth's Pit is destroyed on October 31st, 2020."
Alison looked at her broken finger and whimpered.

2020

With her hands freed from the cuffs, Sinclair raised her hands towards Carlisle, snarling a word of power. His left arm disintegrated in a flare of green light as individual atoms separated. Sinclair fired another blast at his other arm—
But it was too late. An ice pick skewered her in the heart, and she fell to the ground. She gasped, her body jerking, nerves firing randomly. She coughed, gagged, and then her whole body went slack.
Within seconds, all that was left was a dead body in an empty room.##

"We at least got the cuffs off of her that time." Robert looked away from Sinclair's body; it had changed again, but the pick was still in it, in her heart this time. "God dammit. Maybe we should try having her use a pick on him? Hoist them by their own petard and all that?"
Alison frowned. "I'm not sure there's anything I can do here. I…" She began typing again. "Dammit, I can't do this."
"Step away for a bit." Robert frowned. "Let me look it over, see if I can find a way out."
Alison nodded. "Just… don't look too closely. It can screw with your head."
"How much worse can I get?" Robert looked at the red-outlined text. "Maybe you could edit that bit?"
"How would it help? Changing the method of her death so that she looks more dignified?" She frowned. "…hey, Bob, come over here for a second."
"Why?"
Alison plucked the ice pick out of Sinclair's body. "I need to do some tests."
"You're joking, right?" Robert backed away from Alison. "I— what are you going to do, stab me?"
"Yes, but not before I do this." Alison cupped Robert's face with her hand. Her partner gave a yelp of pain as he felt his skin crack into what he was sure was a keyboard— Alison typed several words on it. Suddenly, Robert felt much more immortal and much less likely to feel pain.
"…seriously?" he asked. "You— you can just do that? What the fuck are you?"
"It's a long story, my dude." Alison looked around his eye. "Okay, I think the immortality clause I put in covers regeneration, to, so… try not to flinch?"
With that, Alison drove the ice pick into Robert's eye. He winced, though not in pain, as his eye was destroyed. "…I can feel it in my brain," he frowned.
"Okay, so that won't work." Alison pulled out the ice pick. "I'm going to wait for it to regrow and then try a little to the left…"

2019
"What do you mean it's destroyed?" Alison's finger was tender, her flesh bruised and limp as she tried to touch it. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"All will be revealed if you can fix your hand." Nobody sipped at a cappucino. "Try eating something."
"Grimm Countenance protocols dictate that—"
"Gods' sake." Nobody pinched the bridge of her nose, and touched her hat. "I swear by the power vested in me by Nobody that eating the food in this dimension will cause you no harm. Now have some damn cheese fries."
Alison felt a weight to her words that was reserved for… she didn't know for what, but it was a magnitude more powerful than anything she had seen in Sloth's Pit, or in the Foundation as a whole. She looked at the fries, and bit into it.
"Tell me how those were made."
Alison blinked. "What?"
"How were they made?"
"Uh." She inspected the fries. "I mean, they're defrosted once they arrive from a farm in Oregon and then fried up in hot oil. The cheese sauce was bought surplus from the same company that supplies Taco Bell how the fuck do I know all of this."
"Now tell me about the table we're sitting at. Focus on it."
Alison looked down at it. "Uh. C-construct, based on something a p-painter from the 1600s once did. Don't recognize the name— scratch that, he doesn't have a name."
"And myself?"
Alison stared at her. "…nothing. I'm not seeing anything from you."
"That's because I'm Nobody, and Nobodies don't have backstories. Not really." She shook her head. "You stumbled into this, honestly. If you hadn't succeeded on performing narrative necromancy on your best friend, we might never have noticed you."
Alison swallowed. "I… when I forced Bob to come back, last year. It… it changed me too, I know that much. But I don't know how."
"Robert Tofflemire is… well, he essentially can produce things as the situation calls for it. A bag of marshmallows, or a photograph, or a Kant counter if you really wanted to be a pretentious hack. But you… you rewrote reality by bringing him back from the dead. So, reality decided to give you admin privileges."
"…are you saying I'm a Type-Green?"
"To mangle a metaphor… reality benders are people who try to assemble houses of cards with wrecking balls. You're a grad student operating a 3D printer from the year 2500." She nodded. "You know how to read. Figure out how to write."
Alison frowned. She picked up her cheese fry, dipped it in sauce, and rolled up the sleeve of her arm. Then, she wrote on the inside using cheese sauce, "my finger is fixed."
There was a series of cracking, popping sounds, and the pain in Alison's hand subsided. She flexed her hand, finding all of her fingers functional. "…holy shit."
"I suggest you try to find a way to be less conspicuous about it. Maybe think about investing in a keyboard?" Nobody drank her cappuccino. "Now, I'm sure you have questions. I'll see if I can answer them."
And so, Alison began to ask.

2020
"Missed the brain completely that time," Robert reported. "But it still jacked up my eye."
"I can tell." Alison pulled the pick out and cleaned the gore off once again, before putting it back in Sinclair's heart, with a muttered 'sorry'. "Mark it."
"Uh." Robert drew a dot on the swiftly-closing hole with the marker. "Look, do we have to do it like this? Can't we save her eye?"
"Whatever this is… if it's controlling the narrative, then it has to think she's dead. And as far as I'm concerned, I think Reynolds would rather be in love with a pirate than lose Sinclair." She frowned. "I did like that last take of it, though. I'm going to see about editing it some."
With that, Robert and Alison took their positions by Sinclair's body once again. And Alison began to type, letting the Narrative take over after she had finished her edits.

"That's what I'm missing! That's what people are actually afraid of, in the end— not of death or insects or zombies or their insignificance. They're afraid of not being in control." He laughed a loud, bleating laugh. "I've been here for too long. And even I know not to leave witnesses after giving a monologue like that."
With a flick of his hand, the ice pick flew at Sinclair. The cuffs rattled on their chains as she brought up her hands in a shielding motion; though one thumb was dislocated, it was sufficient to block the pick.
"How the hell?" He snarled, before his eyes were drawn to a smear in the circle. "You actually spat your way out? Seriously?"
"Thank you for not going the low-brow route there." Sinclair stood from her chair, pointed objects falling out with each motion. "Now die."
"How?" Carlisle hissed. "Your chi should be totally blocked by the needles. Y— you're getting help, this isn't fair!"
"Don't know what you're talking about, don't care." Sinclair raised her hand. "Infernus volcana, you son of a bitch!"
Carlisle was consumed by fire, screaming. The physical backlash popped Sinclair's thumb back into place, and when she saw that he was still alive, Sinclair raised her hands towards Carlisle, snarling a word of power. His left arm disintegrated in a flare of green light as individual atoms separated. Sinclair fired another blast at his other arm—
But it was too late. An ice pick skewered through her eye. She felt the surge of magic moments before it hit, and turned her head in an attempt to say a word of deflection— instead, the ice pick's tip went through her eye, through the socket, and out the side of her skull. She convulsed, choked, and collapsed, the pain and shock too much to bear.
Within seconds, all that was left was a n unconscious woman in an empty room.

The white, black, red and blue walls of the room faded into the storage unit. Sinclair laid on the floor, her head mercifully facing away from the two agents. She was stirring, and groaning in pain.
"Did it work?" Robert asked. He heard metal scraping against the floor, and drew his gun; he turned to see the metal tracking amulet, discarded by Alison at the entrance to the unit, drag itself across the floor towards Sinclair. "Holy shit. You— I—"
"Shut up and call an ambulance." Alison grabbed his arm, and within seconds, Robert felt significantly less immortal. "Now."
"Can't you just write one h—" He turned towards Alison, frowning. "S-sorry, but.. who are you?"
Alison looked down at the hand she had just used to rewrite Robert; a hat was in it, solid black, something that looked vaguely like a fedora, but with a far wider brim. She gasped and dropped it, watching as it faded into unreality.
"…what the hell was that?" Robert gawped. "Alice, what— why couldn't I remember who you were there?"
"That was my last free one," Alison frowned. "If I try that again… I don't think I can come back."
"From where?" Robert asked, phone out and keying in 9-1-1. "A-actually, tell me later. Just… let's talk about this."
"…I'll arrange a meeting," Alison nodded, keeping a finger on Sinclair's pulse, hoping that the thaumaturge would survive the night.

« The Taking of Dr. Sinclair| Black Autumn IV Hub | Out of Character, Out of Body»


Dr. Katherine Sinclair practically threw the mug of coffee in her face. Alarms were sounding all over town, and this had now become an official Sloth's Pit Halloween CrisisTM. She was working on three hours of sleep, and very little time. "What's the situation?"
Montgomery Reynolds held his phone with one hand, the other tying his dreadlocks into a more manageable ponytail. "Three Code 72's, a Code 179, a Code 492, a Code 997, and a Code 48."
"And the sun's not even up. Wonderful." Sinclair threw on her coat. "What's a Code 48, again? Zombie attack?"
"That's a Code 84. Code 48 is…" He scrolled down and frowned. "Food shortage at the site. Agents are taking care of that, at least. We're to assess the 179."
"Spontaneous cult activity." Sinclair slid into her shoes. "Please tell me they don't have Kool-Aid."
"That's a code 180— Cult Activity, suicide imminent." He frowned as they made their way out the door. "That was a joke, wasn't it?"
"It was," she admitted, crossing to their car. "I've been listening to two different podcasts about Jonestown. Fascinating, horrible stuff. Makes me glad that I left—" She paused, cleared her throat. "Anyway."
Reynolds frowned. Sinclair had been involved with… something before she joined the Foundation. Whispers around the Site were that she was ex-Serpent's Hand, but he couldn't imagine anyone from the Hand willingly joining the Foundation. He was ex-GOC, and he knew what forced conditioning looked like; it didn't look like a woman whose hair was practically flowing around her between the cold October wind and the sheer amount of anxious magical energy within her. She climbed into the car. "You drive, I need to make some preparations."
Reynolds nodded, climbing into the car with her. He raised an eyebrow as he saw Sinclair put a set of handcuffs in the glovebox. "Dare I ask?"
"Been trying to do those escapology courses from Theta-44. You know, Smoke and Mirrors?" she explained. "Forgot they were in my pocket. I figure that it's useful in our line of work—"
"And you don't want a repeat of April?" Reynolds' face grew warm.
"It wasn't your fault." Sinclair patted his arm as he started the car. "The keys for those are small. Anyone could lose them."
Reynolds smiled at that and started down the street, past an entire field of bizarrely tall scarecrows that weren't there two days ago.

"How have they still not evacuated everyone?" Alison scowled through the clear plastic of her riot helmet, plexiglass shield held before her. People were lined up down Main Street, holding signs that said "OUR TOWN, OUR RIGHTS" and "USA, not S & C P" and other such near-sighted slogans. Alison swore she saw inhuman forms among them; maybe it was the Goatman and his ilk, maybe it was some kind of illusion caused by the Phobic Entity, she didn't know. "Been three days since this shit started."
"I'm just wondering how 59 justified what they did to Amityville for almost a decade." Robert Tofflemire stood next to her, shoulder-to-shoulder, in a long line of agents. "It's not even been a week and I'm sick of having to act like the boot on a human face."
"Just reminds you that we aren't the good guys." Alison checked the riot gun by her side; bean-bag launchers were less-than-lethal, but that didn't mean they couldn't kill someone. "Remember, aim for center-of-mass, not the head—"
"I remember the training, Alison." Robert snapped. He never snapped, and his expression showed he regretted it the instant he spoke. "Sorry. Just… it's getting to me, this whole thing."
"I get what you mean. But anyone who thinks that what the Foundation does is just, or even good, is delusional." She raised her shield to deflect a (thankfully empty) can of beer. "There's a difference between locking up a zombie virus to try to develop a cure and locking up ordinary people for trying to protest."
"Hans, are we the baddies?"
Alison was thankful her mask hid the somewhat disgusted smirk she was wearing. "Get the tear gas grenade off my belt. Roll it, don't throw. Less risk of hitting someone that way."
As Robert grabbed for it, a gunshot rang through downtown, the din of the protesters turning into anxious silence. When the scream of "NO!" came, and then the second shot, they began to disperse, to a degree; many of them went inside the closest building they could find, the lights inside going off, some store owners putting down steel shutters.
The comms turned into frantic chatter, trying to locate the source of the gunshot. Squads were dispersed in groups of two or three to try to find it; Alison and Robert were together, naturally, and they ran south, based off of Robert's instinct.
It couldn't have been more than three minutes since the shots rang out when they reached their apparent origin: the 400 block of South Wozniak. The buildings were a little run-down (several businesses there had closed due to the virus, and whether they'd reopen was up in the air) but it looked safe enough.
Sitting up on the ground, clutching his arm, was the tall and dreadlocked form of Montgomery Reynolds. He screamed in anguish as blood flowed from beneath his fingers.
"Easy, easy." Robert drew a first-aid kit from his belt, using a pair of scissors to cut along Reynolds's sleeve. "C'mon, let's see if there's an ex—" He paused. "Alice?"
"What?" Alison had taken up a defensive position on the side of the car opposite of Reynolds. "Get him over here, c'mon."
"He… he's barely even grazed. There's a lot of blood, but… it-it didn't hit anything." Robert helped Reynolds to his feet. "And… I don't think he's in physical pain.
Alison blanched as she realized who the car belonged to, and who was absent. "Where's Sinclair?"
"That motherfucking sonofabitch took her!" Reynolds stood, yelling. "Katherine!"
"Slow down." Robert managed to at least get some gauze over the wound and tape before Reynolds started to storm off. "Who took her? And what were you doing here?"
"G-got a report of cult activity." Reynolds pressed the gauze on his arm. "Were dispatched to investigate. It was a trap. That… freak took Katherine. It… it looked like a burned corpse, it shouldn't have been able to move that fast!"
"Who issued the report?" Alison took the tablet from out of the car's passenger seat. "We didn't get a Code 179 on any of our scanners." She tapped the report, finding it filled with garbage data, barring the GPS coordinates and the name of the agent who filed it. "…who the fuck is 'Benedict Carlisle'?"

Katherine Sinclair had a burlap sack pulled roughly off of her head. She shook hair out of her face, and found herself inside of a circle of salt. Beyond that were three bare walls and a large steel door— some kind of storage unit somewhere? There was a Stor-4-U on the outskirts of town, near the edge of the Nexus zone. But how had she gotten here?
In answer, a blur of motion moved through the shadows. A single bare bulb ignited above her, briefly blinding her. "What the fuck?" she hissed. "Who's there?"
Instead of a reply, there was a scratch of needle against vinyl, some popping sounds, and then the unmistakable opening chords of Smash Mouth's Walking on the Sun. It had been a favorite song of hers, back when she was in college, when she met… "No." She swallowed. "You're… you're dead. I burned you to a crisp. This isn't real."
From the shadows, a form stirred. Its face peered into the light. At first, Sinclair recoiled, sure that she was looking at 106 or some other equally horrible thing; but 106 was rotted, not burned, and instead of that jacket that it wore for some reason nobody had been able to explain, this corpse wore a Pittsburgh Panthers T-Shirt, with the bottom half of it largely charred. It spoke with a rasping whisper. "It ain't no joke, Kit-Kat." It sounded almost exactly like her ex-boyfriend.
Benedict "Burnout" Carlisle was one of the best pyromancers the Serpent's Hand had seen in the modern age, and had drawn Sinclair into the world of the anomalous in October of 2001. He was her first love, a partner in crime, a rebellious spirit. And he was also very much dead.
The being's face creaked as he smiled. His eyes were melted out of their sockets, staining his cheeks with an odd residue. "We have so, so much catching up to do." He shook his head. "Did you think I wasn't going to come back to bite you? The Serpent Herself chose me." He crossed the salt boundary, careful not to disturb the physical barrier. Somehow, he failed to disturb the spiritual one as well, which should have been impossible. Crossing a magical circle breaks the sanctity of it, but he had practically skipped over it to get right into her face. "I have always been with you, Katherine. As long as your memory of me lives, I cannot be vanqui—"
Sinclair headbutted him— or tried to. He sprang back out of the circle with a speed greater than his charred condition should have allowed. A rasping laugh which almost turned into a bleat at the end sounded. "Fucking Jailors have no taste for theatrics. You were always going to turn coat. I was foolish to think otherwise."
"And you were always insane." Sinclair rolled her neck; she'd braced for an impact that never came, and was sure she felt something pop from it. "You wanted to burn down our fucking college because you didn't want to do the work, plagiarized a paper, and got expelled."
"Not the whole college!" he pointed out. "Just the Dean. And the Student Union— but if that's where the Dean decided he was going to be, then too bad for him."
Sinclair spat at him. It didn't even reach the edge of the circle. "What the hell do you want?"
Instead of responding, he pulled a small metal cart from the shadows that covered the rest of the room; a set of long, pointed tools were on it, all rusted, all dirty, and several serrated. "Do you know why the lobotomy was so popular for decades?"
Sinclair swallowed. "The… the Foundation had a role in it. They… wanted to make sure Type-Blues couldn't… use their abilities."
He nodded. "An average lobotomy pick can't quite reach the pineal gland, but if you scramble the frontal lobe enough, it's the same basic effect— you lose all sense of spirituality, creativity. And without either of those things, you lose magic." He spun the pick in his hand. "The Sinclair I knew would rather die than give up her magic, but… well, I don't want to kill you. I just want you to do some things for me."
Sinclair spat again. "Fuck off."
The pick flew at the inside of her right elbow. She expected pain, but there wasn't even blood on her clothing; he had hit an acupuncture point. Everything below her right elbow went numb. She tried to move it, only to hear the rattling of handcuffs.
"Language, Kit-Kat." Carlisle tsked. "Now, I have a modest proposal for you."
"What?"
"Burn every single Jailor in this town alive, or lose your magic forever."

"I have vital signs," Alison sighed with relief. "But I can't get a topographical fix. Her chips are pinging off of every router in town."
"Same here," Tofflemire confirmed. "What the hell, is this thing a hacker now?"
In the backseat, Reynolds was actually, genuinely praying. It was a soft prayer, in a language that neither of them spoke. At first, Tofflemire assumed it was some kind of spell, but there wasn't that crackle of energy in the air that accompanied him or Sinclair doing that kind of thing. Occasionally, they'd hear a desperate "please" in there.
"Reynolds." Alison snapped. "Get it together, man. Last time something like this happened, you charged into the woods after her with a fucking magic cavalry saber."
"T— I knew what took her that time! I don't know what this is!" He panted. "And… I…" He swallowed. "She… she didn't know I loved her. Not then."
Tofflemire frowned. "She always knew, Monty. Everyone did. This…" He frowned. "This isn't like you. You're…" His frown deepened. "This isn't like you."
Alison started up the car and drove. Three minutes later, they came upon what had once been a body shop, before it had closed down due to the pandemic drying up business. She exited the car to open the garage, drove in, and closed it behind them.
"What are you…" Robert began.
"I think he's having a prolonged panic attack. Darkness and quiet helps." She chewed her lip. "I had one that lasted an entire day. We just… have to let him let it out."
"P-pathetic." Reynolds sniffed. "A-almost fifty, a-and I'm s-sobbing like—"
"Don't dwell on that." Alison put a hand on his arm. "We just… we need to to calm down, Montgomery. You're the only other Type-Blue at the Site that has any real skill, and… well, you know Sinclair better than anyone." She squeezed his arm. "Can you… put together a tracking spell of some kind?"
"I…" He swallowed. "I need to be calmer. S-strong emotions interfere with… with magic." He shook his head. "And I need to be sober to do it."
Robert tapped his tablet, making sure the light was low enough that it didn't disturb Reynolds. "Bringing up his vitals now. Blood sugar's low. Think food might help?"
"7-Eleven around the corner, go," Alison nodded.
Robert quietly exited the car and made his way out of the garage. They were left sitting in the dark.
"Have you ever… l-lost someone you loved?"
Alison chewed her lip. "Never really loved anyone. Not the way you love Sinclair." She shook her head. "But… Bob tore me apart, when I found him on the ground like that. Fought to bring him back." She squeezed his arm, softly. "You're not going to lose her, Montgomery. I promise."
After those words had left her lips, she felt a weight fall on her soul. She knew that she had made a horrible mistake, and had possibly cost Sinclair her life.

Carlisle lazily threw another pick at Sinclair. It impacted with a soft grunt from his prisoner. "I'm getting bored of this, Katherine. It's simple— just burn the motherfuckers you've fallen in bed with (literally, if I understand) to individual carbon atoms, and you can be let go." He tilted his head. "Or do you not think I'm serious? Do you not think I'm the real Ben Carlisle?"
Sinclair glared up at him. Her entire body was covered in various needles, spikes, picks, and pointed implements which had buried themselves in acupuncture points across her body. Somehow she wasn't spurting blood everywhere, but she was numb in a dozen places, in excruciating pain in a dozen others. She struggled to speak, to breathe. "P-please," she choked out. "You were n-never this ad-adventurous."
With a crunching flick of his burned wrist, a handful of pointed objects were extracted from Sinclair's flesh. She felt the pain subside to a dull ache. "Well, what do you think I am, then?"
"S-something that's invaded my town. A phobic entity. Not a phobophage, I don't think, they tend t-to get too f-fat to operate on Halloween."
Carlisle rolled his eyes. "Your town? Please. This town belongs to the people, not under the thumb of some fascist regime." He tilted his head. "Though… given what the country's set to look like for the next decade, I suppose this is just a practice run."
Sinclair laughed. "You're trying to be an oracle, now? You could barely see the end of your nose, and you're saying you see the future?" She tried to shake her head, though it flopped to one side more than anything. "Ghh. And the damnedest thing is, I'm not even afraid of you." Her arm twitched against the handcuffs holding her. "Hard to scare someone with a dead ex that they didn't even like at the very end."
He shook his head. "What would you do, then? Kill your fear? Even if I was this 'phobic entity' or whatever bull the Jailors are feeding you, it is a very bad idea to kill fear. And secretly?" Carlisle was in the circle, whispering in her ear. "We, humans, love fear."
"I don't follow."
Carlisle chuckled, stepping out of the salt circle. "Fear begets anger begets hate. People like being afraid because it gives their life… well, maybe not meaning, but an antagonist. An enemy force in a war, a vague mass of anger out to destroy your way of life, a disease that will wipe out humanity as we know it… and without fear, we wouldn't give a rat's ass about any of it." He spoke a word, and threw the ice pick over his shoulder, where it hovered in mid-air in front of Sinclair's right eye. "I'm your antagonist, Kit-Kat. I'm a survival mechanism. I am Darwin's wet dream."
"And I am remembering why we took a break after you took Philosophy 1010." Sinclair grunted as she inched away from the ice pick, dragging the chair ever so slightly with her. "Stick that in the wrong place, and I won't be able to feel the fear you're preaching about."
"Actually, the amygdala controls that response, and those are too far in for an ice pick to reach." He looked over his shoulder. "Though, I suppose I could lengthen it…"
"Screw you." Sinclair spat. "We've been kicking your ass around Site-87 for the last month, whatever you are. So you think you're a big shot around town? Guess what: you're stuck here."
That gave him pause. "What was that?"
"Anomalies that enter a Nexus like this have a hell of a time leaving again. Every time I leave town, I have to actually get out of my car and walk over the boundary because I feel like I'm going to be squashed against the seat otherwise. And I'm just a mortal goddamn mage." She looked up at Carlisle. "If you're not born of this Nexus, guess what? You're stuck here now. And it's just a matter of time before we figure out how big your cell needs to be so we can lock you up and throw away the key."
"Liar!" He snapped. "You lying bitch! You lying fucking bitch piece of shit motherfucking bitch!"
"Hey, that was one of his tics." Sinclair chuckled. "Whenever he felt like he was losing control, he'd start swearing like a sailor."
The stream of swears was stopped. The form of Carlisle stood upright, fluid, no longer taking on the stiff and rigid motions of a burned corpse. "…control." He laughed. "Oh, I am an idiot, Kit-Kat. Thank you. Thank you."
Sinclair's heart sank. "…for what?"
"That's what I'm missing! That's what people are actually afraid of, in the end— not of death or insects or zombies or their insignificance. They're afraid of not being in control." He laughed a loud, bleating laugh. "I've been here for too long. And even I know not to leave witnesses after giving a monologue like that."
With a flick of his hand, the ice pick drove itself through Sinclair's eye. She gasped, her body jerking, nerves firing randomly. She coughed, gagged, and then her whole body went slack.
Within seconds, all that was left was a dead body in an empty room.

Alison Carol and Robert Tofflemire were drawn to the parking lot of the Stor-4-U Facility by a charm Reynolds had cooked up: a lock of Sinclair's hair, tied to a fifty cent piece, at the end of a string hanging from their car's rearview mirror. It had taken them half an hour to triangulate the position.
"Okay." Alison exited the car, holding the makeshift medallion in her hand. It floated in front of her, pointing the way to Sinclair's rough location. "It looks like it's pulling towards Row K. Cover me."
"Roger." Tofflemire's heart hurt, for some reason. "You… ever get a sense of impending doom, Alice?"
"All the time." She walked slowly, footsteps heavy against the concrete. Then, as they crossed past the first two units of Row K, the medallion suddenly went limp. "W-what does… that mean?"
"Reynolds said the spell would work as…" Tofflemire's eyes widened. "As long as she was alive…"
The two of them smashed at the locks of over half a dozen units with crowbars. Robert found her. He couldn't believe it was her. Katherine Sinclair had fiery red hair, pale skin, and far too many freckles. It couldn't have been her slumped over in that chair, hands cuffed behind her back, a fucking ice pick in her eye. But there she was.
"Jesus Christ." Robert tugged at his hair. "What the fuck, what the fuck… how— thi- this isn't supposed to h-happen, this— this is- I…" He sat down in the corner of the unit, letting out a gasping sob. "Fuck…"
"I…" Alison swallowed. "I… promised him… W- we could have saved her…" Alison crossed over to Sinclair's body. She put on gloves, checking for a pulse, knowing it was a feeble maneuver. She had once heard someone say that the leading cause of death in America was hope— she didn't know who, and she wasn't sure she cared.
"What the fuck are we going to tell Reynolds?" Alison sighed, moving to close Sinclair's intact eyelid. As she did, she felt cracks form along the skin of the corpse. Her eyes widened. "…no way."
"What—" Robert looked up, eyes widening as he saw what was happening to Sinclair's face. All along her forehead and the left side of it, a keyboard conforming to the shape of her face had appeared. He blinked tears from his eyes. "What the- I- Alison, what is that?"
Alison experimentally tapped on several of the keys. The entire room around them changed— every surface glowed with a white light, with darkness in uneven patterns atop it. A single, black bar blinked in one corner of the room, where text formed that said 'a single, black bar blinked in one corner of the room'.
"Holy shit." Alison stared. "Uh… I-I don't know what this is going to do to us… Bob, come over here. I want you to be safe when I do this."
"Do what?" Robert came over to her side. "Are— are you going to fucking try to Narrate her back to life? I don't know if you remember, but last time that happened, I got poorly-defined narrative superpowers."
"Apparently so did I." Alison screwed up her eyes, and in an instant, a large swath of the text on the wall was highlighted in blue. "So glad I don't have to work with a typewriter input for this."
"Have you done this before?" Robert asked.
"Not as such. I've done smaller things, but… we're talking about at least an hour of time here that I'm going to have to edit." She chewed her lip. "I'm not going to do major edits to this. I'm just… going to add in a few lines." Her eyes scanned the walls for applicable passages. She landed on one from far earlier in the day, and Alison grinned. "There. She missed a gun."
"As in a rifle, or a Chekhov's?"
"The latter. I— I can feel it. There was a way for her to escape, she just didn't see it in time." She swallowed. "Hold on. This is going to get weird."

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