SCP-2156 didn't think that she was a person who wanted many things. Honestly, she didn't really care what happened to herself; maybe she had cared when Professor Harley had called her in to have a “talk” that left her trembling and shaking; maybe she had cared when she had realized that she was in no way capable of functioning as a human being, let alone as a cashier. But that was the past, and the past was gone. Since then she had realized that she had no recourse if the deck was stacked against her.
So, truth be told, even though she had probably cared when suddenly Jessica was a ball of skin and blood trapped in a cage of bone, she didn't really recall much of a reaction to waking up the next morning in a jail cell. It was a new place, nothing more. There were new people. She imagined that for most, things like freedom or autonomy or normality were all very attractive, appealing concepts, but SCP-2156 did not want. She did not care if she got better or worse. She wasn't sure what better or worse was. “Better” was a conception of herself where she did not have to stay in this cage so that other people would not be hurt. “Better” her belonged in society. “Better” her was strange and alien, and she was not sure she liked this person.
SCP-2156 wanted only very few things. Sleep was one of them.
“I don't understand,” she said. “I thought that we'd be discussing meds today. You know. For, uh, for the insomnia?”
“I know,” Dr. Garland said, clasping his hands together. His face was pinched in something that looked like frustration. “And I'm sorry. We want to be absolutely certain that any medication we give you doesn't interact in unexpected ways with your anomalous condition. We're still not sure if the condition is biological in nature, and if it is, we certainly don't want…”
“Right.”
Dr. Garland coughed. “Yes. We're going to have to wait on medication.”
“It's just—”
This was a pretty serious problem, wasn't it? SCP-2156 had learned that life was hemmed on both sides by antithetical contradictions. On one side was the eternal sleep of death and on the other side was the waking death of insomnia. She walked through the valley of two deaths and was not afraid. But regardless of poetics, the waking death was miserable, and even if SCP-2156 didn't want much she still wanted sleep.
Once upon a time she had been pretty sure that if she went crazy there would be some sort of procedure for either making her sane again or else quarantining her from the sane people who didn't deserve to be in contact with her, but actually going crazy and discovering that there was some inscrutable and hideous enigma wrapped inside her bones had taught her that no such procedure existed. Therapy and the Foundation were bullshit. Garland was pretty nice though.
That was it.
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
“Well…”
SCP-2156 stared at Garland. She wondered what it was like to be a therapist working for the Foundation. How much did Garland think about his own work? How much did Garland's consciousness press against the confines of the Foundation's bars? It was trivially easy to manipulate and lie. SCP-2156 wasn't stupid; Garland did it to her every day. Was it to help or to control? To accept or to assimilate? There was no observable distinction between any of those things.
But most of all SCP-2156 was struck by how well Garland hid the signs of helplessness and impotency that brewed within him. People had layers. All she did was shuffle them around. The whole was the sum of the parts and summation was commutative so what did it matter what order people were in? Whether it was ugly or beautiful all of it was you. All of it was her. What did she want? She didn't know. Nothing and everything. Shuffling herself was hard.
“If there's anything you'd like to talk about…”
There wasn't.

She was being led back to her room. She didn't know why she had been taken out. The blank, sterile hallway was marked at regular intervals by the pattern: guard-door-guard, guard-door-guard. She didn't know where the Foundation got this many people to dress up in black combat gear and stand still. She could not see their faces. They flashed by like rows of orchard trees planted in the nothingness between San Francisco and Los Angeles. They flashed by like a deck of cards being shuffled. They flashed by like a flipbook animation. Stillness begot motion. There were contradictions hiding in the fabric of all things.
One of the guards was shuffling a deck of cards in his hands. SCP-2156 heard the machine-gun flickering of card slapping against card over and over. The next guard was also shuffling a deck of cards. The third one was playing with a matryoshka doll.
She was in her cell again. There was another matryoshka doll. Who cared? Strange things happened.
SCP-2156 sat down by the doll and figured that she would unravel the secrets of the universe.
One layer gone. Capillary beds. She had never needed to play solitaire with her body to figure out what was one layer down. Red flesh. Raw, stinging pain. She winced as blood flowing from the ripped skin around her nails dripped onto her calculus final. Professor Davidson never noticed it. She remembered not being able to sleep for the first time and wondering if she was going insane.
Two layers gone. She had broken her arm playing basketball. The bone stuck through the skin. Morphine coursed through her veins, and she understood why people said that morphine was addictive. Addiction was another paradox, like life. On either side of the valley there was the sleeping release from pain or the waking embrace of it. A body anesthetized and a mind awakened were in symmetry. Millions of people needed to dig to find emotion.
Three layers gone. The world was far more complicated than she had imagined, and nobody was in any position to understand it. Did they try to understand her? A girl who played solitaire with the world? She looked inside her and saw nothing but black and red, flashing and shuffling. Black blobs—might be a card—stood on either side of her. White blob—definitely not a card—explained what they did. The goal of the Special Containment Procedures Foundation was to observe preternatural phenomena and develop new theories of science based on their behavior. She knew with complete certainty that white blob was lying to her.
There was nothing predictable and certainly nothing understandable about the world. She saw the universe and all its layers. She saw gloved hands hiding red skin shuffle the layers of the universe over and over and over again. If she were to stop those hands then she could finally flip through the cards and figure out how the universe's cards were stacked, but nobody would ever stop them. They were eternal.
Four layers gone. She dried off her hair, checked to make sure her roommate was still out, and started crying. Mom called to ask her if everything was all right. The boy two rows down and three columns to the left said, “Don't stick it in the crazy.” She looked at a piece of paper and saw nothing but a game of windowed solitaire. She realized that she could not learn or excel in school. She realized that nobody had the patience to put up with her. She realized that there was nothing connecting her to the world, and all the realizations mounted higher until she reached the truth of the world, placed upon a glowing pedestal—the world could not have her.
She saw red and black—black hair sticking out of red flesh. Red blood and black bile.
She removed the fifth layer. The doll was smiling at her. She began to fall through the layers, and as they flashed by they showed her the stuttering, banal flipbook movie of her existence. There was neither end nor bottom; there was only the truth that the fifth layer was oblivion and that oblivion was all she would ever be.
Her skin was thin and fragile, and inside of her there was nothing.

“How's your sleep been?”
SCP-2156 stared at the wood grain of the table. “It's been all right.”
“Nothing too out of the ordinary going on with your sleep patterns recently?”
The creases of her gloves were like the weathered face of an old lady. She was wearing somebody else's skin because nobody, least of all herself, could stand her own.
There was a red pen in front of Garland. She wondered why he wrote in red.
The wall was monochromatic. It had always been monochromatic. What a dumb observation.
Garland coughed. “SCP-2156?”
“Sorry. I just…yeah.” SCP-2156 looked Garland in the face for a second, felt him staring back at her, and then looked away. “I think that everything's been fine.”
She remembered the matryoshka doll. Ever since she had come into this cell she had realized that she was self-aware of much more than before. When she went into the temporary nirvana of re-shuffling she could feel each layer of her mind shift against the other until for a moment, perfect harmony and order was achieved, before entropy piled up while doubt and hate bred and multiplied in the recesses of her mind. She could touch each layer of her soul. And now, she could feel the matryoshka doll imprinted on every one of them.
“Are you sure?”
Who the hell did Garland think he was? A ball of good intentions and mediocre actions trying to read her mind? She was the one who could see the layers, not him. He was a man with the insight of a toddler.
“Yeah.”
Garland scratched his neck. “We really can't proceed with the sleeping medication matter until we're absolutely certain that nothing unexpected is going on with your condition. We want to do everything possible to help you, SCP-2156, but I must remind you that we are an organization that serves the public first and foremost. We can't afford…”
“I'm not hiding anything.”
Her matryoshka doll reshuffled until the dream became the deepest layer.
SCP-2156 pulled on her gloves. “So that's a ‘no' on meds, I guess.”
Garland nodded.
“How am I supposed to sleep?”
“Well, we can keep working on your anxiety. Until I receive a green light for some sort of sleeping medication, that's the most we can do, unfortunately.”
SCP-2156 sat in silence. She felt her cheeks begin to tingle. She didn't want many things, but those things that she did want were beginning to pile up. She wanted sleep. She didn't want to keep talking to Garland. She wanted nothing more than to disappear, because she could be completely certain that absolutely nobody would miss her.
“…meds.”
“I'm sorry? I didn't—can you speak up?”
“I just want some meds, all right? I know I'm a threat, and I know that I'm dangerous. But I really don't know what I deserve, or if I even deserve anything—I just—this is all that I want, I swear, I just want some sleep. Do you have any idea how boring it gets in here? Four walls, some shitty books, and a brain that doesn't know how to fucking go to sleep? I know you know it's boring, that's why you keep sending people, but do you have any idea how much time I spend in here with nothing but my thoughts—“
They flickered one after the other after the other, but no matter how fast they raced they would never go fast enough to reveal the truth.
“— about how—about how—“
There was the world, comprised entirely of this cell. There were people who day by day were unaware that the present was slipping them by and that a stranger would be occupying their skin in the next second. They didn't have to care. The world was in a state of perpetual blissful innocence. It was painted in colors that would make a baby laugh and coo, hues of industrial ink that were to be played with by smooth hands.
The world had one layer. It could not be shuffled. There was no place in it that she belonged.
It was at times like these that the miasma of SCP-2156's thoughts coalesced into something that could be called emotion; this time, like most times, that emotion was fear. A red sliver of skin poked through the gap between her right glove and her wrist. It was the same color as a clown's nose or a sports car, except her skin was dull and dry, giving it a grayish tint.
She had been kneeling on the floor of her college dormitory when she saw herself in the shattered remains of a mirror, face bright red like a caricature of a human being. God, she was hideous.
“I just want some sleep,” she said to nobody. Garland was long gone.
All seven face-up cards were red. She screamed in frustration as the world fell apart around her.

“Hey, have a seat. Sorry we're out of coffee. And donuts. Also sorry that we had to call you over on such short notice, Doctor, uh…Garland. Been busy.”
Garland nodded. “I understand. Please, take your time.”
The meeting room was a perfect example of the Foundation not really getting aesthetics. It was blandly pleasant, but it made Garland feel detached, like he was an avatar projected into this half-real room. Everything was too bright and too smooth. The room felt like it was melting.
Garland briefly wondered how the researchers could put up with such a charade, because they knew the internal anatomy of the Foundation, what fueled its beating heart, and what perverse blood flowed through its tortuous limbs. Everything was so much more real when the skin matched the flesh in barren, ugly containment cells. Garland almost felt more at home there, where at least the Foundation achieved some sort of consistency. If he could choose one thing to fix about the Foundation, it would be the incoherency in the inoffensively flat décor of the offices.
“Right. As you probably know, I'm the HMCL supervisor for SCP-641. Uh, you've read the file?”
Garland nodded again.
“Fantastic. Nice to meet you.”
They shook hands. Garland smelled his cologne. His palms were crisp and perfectly dry.
“Mm. I understand that, yesterday, SCP-2156 underwent one of its…active phases? And that you were present?”
“Yes.”
“Report says that you were almost…mm. Kind of dangerous, isn't it? I'd talk to your HMCL guy about modifying the containment procedures, honestly.”
Garland shrugged. “There are hazards. Humanoids can get upset during sessions. It's happened before. I have a decent bereavement package, so I don't complain.”
The HMCL supervisor laughed briefly and loudly. “Of course. Anyway. A strange coincidence happened. At the same time as that active state, SCP-641 showed us some, uh, previously unobserved behavior. Spontaneously started disassembling itself.”
“So you're hypothesizing a connection.”
“Hey,” the supervisor said, throwing his hands in the air. “We scan the event logs for this sort of coincidence for a reason. One skip is containable. Two is bad news. If one of those two is a humanoid, worse news. Look, I've been in this for some time, and honestly, ten years ago, this happens, I commission Telekill rooms.”
The supervisor laughed again, loud and short like before. “Yeah. 641 has mind-affecting abilities, which nine times out of ten implies some sort of psychic potential, and from the file, 2156 sounds a lot like a bixby—“
“Bixby?”
“Uh, reality warper. Excuse the slang. Some of my retrieval buddies have rubbed off on me. It's a reality warper.”
“SCP-2156 hasn't really demonstrated any willful control over its anomalous properties, and I was under the impression that was one of the criteria to be considered…”
The supervisor waved his hand. “Criteria don't matter. You can't categorize something if you don't understand it. Functionally speaking, it might not look like a reality warper, but the nature of its abilities would seem to suggest—look, this is a discussion I should be having with 2156's HMCL supervisor. Sorry. Let's get back on track. What we need to know is if 2156 has been behaving normally lately.”
“Would you like suspicion or fact?”
“Suspicion is usually more useful.”
“There have been subtle irregularities. I think that it's hiding something. Besides the recent preoccupation with sleeping medication, it becomes nervous each time we discuss its dreams.”
“Right. I'll have you submit a formal report later. We need to document these sorts of things. Besides that, though, I just thought that I'd give you a heads-up that you might not be working on the 2156 project for much longer.”
“Excuse me?”
“First of all, this isn't set, because if it were, your supervisor would be the one telling you this, not me. I don't know anything for certain. I'm just speculating. And second of all, this isn't a reflection on your capabilities whatsoever. In fact, it has nothing to do with them.”
There was a moment of silence as the HMCL supervisor sighed. “There are just patterns, you know. I'm speaking here as an employee to an employee, not HMCL staff to skip therapist. The Foundation's going to cut its losses soon.”
“I don't understand.”
“There are some things that are not supposed to be in this world—or, well, we've determined that they're not supposed to, anyway. Which is reasonable, you know, because both of us have done enough work in this place to know that somebody has to make those decisions. And sometimes I guess that we pretend that we're trying to help…”
The two men made eye contact for a moment as the reality of Garland's occupation occurred to both of them simultaneously. “Well,” the supervisor said. “I mean, in some cases we probably do make decent efforts at helping. But, really, if we start thinking about questions of necessity, then things get messy. Humanoids…a friend of mine in retrieval said that she thought of them like shipwrecked sailors, and for a while we like to think that providing therapy and protecting them and whatever is like trying to guide them back home, but the reality of the situation is that we're not home, we're the island in the middle of nowhere. And SCP-2156 is going to realize that very soon.”
There was a long silence as Garland stared at the man.
“I'm not sure…” Garland said.
“Well, whatever,” the supervisor said. “Not our job to think about this.”

SCP-2156 woke up to a lie staring her in the face. The bed and the walls and the drawer and her clothes all seemed to be the same, but they were not. SCP-2156 could look one layer—just one layer—down beneath the surface of the façade and see the deception. She had been moved. The Foundation had changed its evaluation of her, and now the walls themselves muttered of containment instead of protection and of safety instead of welfare. How long had she been asleep? Thirty minutes, an hour? The Foundation worked quickly.
She had dreamt about the matryoshka doll every time she had gone to sleep for the past—ten meals divided by three and rounded down, that was three days. The doll was calling for her, and if SCP-2156 knew anything she knew that matryoshka dolls weren't supposed to send out siren songs.
She could see her entire past laid out in picture frames by the matryoshka doll. She could relive every weakness and insecurity, and in doing so, she grew one step closer and closer to the truth, to that nothingness that was inside her, and out of that void something of great design and inscrutable purpose would be born. For one instant everything would fall into order, and then she would be at peace. The only way forward was the doll. So long as she kept finding new layers within herself, she could keep shuffling, and so long as she kept shuffling, she would find order. So long as there was the chance that order would be found, she could maintain the delusion that everything would be all right. That was how critical the doll was to everything. To the universe itself. It was a small, wooden, painted toy that formed a pillar holding up the sky.
She needed to be reshuffled again, but for that reshuffling to mean anything, she needed the doll. In the corners of her mind that the doll whispered to, there was nothing but silence.
SCP-2156 stood and began to pace. She told herself that she needed to calm down—but who was really telling her that? Was it really her?
“I just need some sleep,” she said.
The Foundation wasn't giving her any sleeping meds. Why was it so hard? What was so difficult about giving somebody with insomnia medication? She wanted nothing more than for her brain to be pummeled into unconsciousness by a chemical cocktail. The snarling abominations of 3 AM doubts were prowling about her on all sides. She was continually hounded by them. An eternal hunt with herself comprised the entirety of her existence, and she was tired of running in circles.
If everything could just shut up for a moment—
She just needed some sleep.
The Foundation had moved her. They had uprooted her out of one of its metal labyrinths and popped her straight into another. The matryoshka doll was gone, but something was whispering truths into her ear even now. The universe cascaded in a series of layers that she could sift through and examine at her leisure. Garland wasn't coming back. She doubted any of the others were either. Deep in the roaring machinery of the dark, ancient monolith that called itself the SCP Foundation, men in white lab coats were typing away at computers, filing reports. These reports were aimed at changing the special containment procedures of the object known as SCP-2156. There would be restrictions imposed and precautions taken. An incident report had been filed when she had almost killed Garland. But the Foundation, for all its knowledge and its power, could not know everything, and in those twisting alleyways of ignorance, the Foundation's power meant nothing.
No matter what, they could not say how the deck would be ordered.

Time passed. There were no meals, so she couldn't say how much. After time was finished passing, one of the room's walls became transparent. An unfamiliar man in a white coat stood on the other side.
“Good morning, SCP-2156.”
“Why have you taken me here?”
“You have been relocated because we're concerned about your safety and the general well-being. Specifically, we have good reason to believe that there were unforeseen factors about your prior containment site that negatively influenced your mental health. These factors constituted an unacceptable risk of containment breach. As such, we have taken steps to minimize cross-contamination potential and—"
“Why isn't Garland coming back?”
The doctor's face scrunched up. “I'm sorry?”
“Don't lie to me.”
“I really don't have any idea what you're talking about.”
She had seen muscle and sinew. She had seen bones, marrow, capillaries, veins, organs—its heart and all the chambers, the valves pumping all the sludge through the body—the nerves leading up to a brain that hid secrets from itself. She had seen it all. The Foundation didn't even know itself. They were kindred spirits, like that—
“Don't lie to me,” she said again. She knew where she was. She was on the very fringes of the world, where everything that did not belong was placed so that it could continue on not-belonging inoffensively. For all of history the Foundation had kept everything safely on the sidelines so that society could function. She knew the truth.
And of herself, what did she know?
The doctor took a picture out of his coat. “Do you know what this is?”
“It's the doll.”
“Where have you seen it?”
“Everywhere.”
“Everywhere? I don't understand.”
“In my sleep and in my dreams. Out of the corners of my eyes. It's on the fringe, just like I am.”
“Have you ever begun to disassemble this object?”
SCP-2156 closed her eyes. “Over and over.”
“Right. Why did you not report the reoccurrence of this object in your dreams to your therapist?”
SCP-2156 was silent.
“All right. I want you to understand that there have been new restrictions placed upon you. The luxuries of your previous containment protocols were contingent upon an incident-free record, a condition which has decidedly not been met. You almost killed the previous therapist. We will have to be much more cautious when dealing with you.”
SCP-2156 looked up and opened her eyes. “I have a question. Are you going to give me sleeping meds?”
“In all likelihood, no. We do not acquiesce to the demands of SCP objects when there is no good reason to do so.”
“Right,” SCP-2156 said. “That's right.”
There was nothing resembling humanity here. The Foundation stripped it away from their own agents and researchers just as readily as it did so from its prisoners. She could feel the throbbing hum of mystery packed against horror packed against contradiction. The Foundation was a teeming, frothing ocean, filled from top to bottom with things that nobody could understand, an impenetrable, unknowable volume of liquid black. The Foundation did not care for anything or help anything because whatever agency of its own it had spent hiding its own secrets from itself.
She felt a moment of truth and absolute clarity. There had been a festering, ugly emotion deep inside of her for the past several days—it had been the fear-anger of anxiety and insecurity. She had been laboring under the misconception that here she was out of place and that the world outside of these walls was hers. She had thought it was where she belonged, despite her ink-black skin spotted red with murder. But she had been very, very wrong. She did not belong in the world because it had one layer and no mysteries. When she had realized this truth she had been afraid, but the truth had to be accepted.
There was a Foundation under the Foundation of sterile white lab coats and precisely operated mechanical cell doors. There was a Foundation of unspeakable inhumanity and cruelty, there was a Foundation of self-sacrifice and heroism, there was a Foundation of unreality and insanity and madness all lurking beneath the surface. Every single Foundation employee she had witnessed had only been the facade of the madhouse. They were being moved by purposes mysterious to guard objects unknowable.
She felt the fear-anger build. There was no escape from the walls of this Foundation, not even in her own sleep. Everything might be plausibly acceptable if her masters were simple, knowable people—university deans, parents, supervisors—but this was not the case. Something in the contradiction of an organization trying to give order to the most absolute chaos had fractured the layers of the people in charge. One day, perhaps arbitrarily, these people had decided not to give her sleep.
Sleep had been the illusory chemical sanctuary from the world in which she did not belong. It was gone. What remained were bloodshot eyes and a desert of a mind where the winds of fatigue and doubt constantly scoured the surface of the sand. SCP-2156 felt a cruel, vindictive satisfaction. Whatever happened from here on out was not her fault. The Foundation had not given her sleep. It had dragged her to the very boundaries of the waking world and then forced her to remain. Whatever happened as a consequence could not be avoided.
Emotion drained from her. She closed her eyes and felt beneath her for the layers of the world. She could shuffle them however she saw fit.
The doll was calling for her again. It was calling for her with a mind powerful enough to reach out of the wooden confines of the toy and invade the private sanctuary of the human soul. Within that mind was boundless potential for torture and sadism, for the violent restructuring of the pliable human consciousness, but it held within it only one thought. The doll wanted nothing more than to be taken apart, it wanted nothing more than to see the world fall apart around it—for her to strip away pretension after pretension until nothing but the dizzying void of the center remained. The Foundation had made a mistake. Distance was of no concern anymore.
She moved the ace of clubs to the home stack; the face-down card underneath it flipped over to reveal the impassive face of the matryoshka doll staring back at her. See? There it was at her feet. Solitaire was easy.
The researcher's eyes widened before the wall became opaque again. SCP-2156 didn't care. This was exactly where she belonged, in this institution of horrors, in this room with the matryoshka doll on the floor. She would find all the layers of the Foundation, and she would find all the layers of herself. SCP-2156 began to cry. She couldn't remember being this happy.
She knelt down, grasped the doll, and disappeared.

SCP-2156 was dying. Death was not nearly as unpleasant as she might have expected. It was, in truth, rather relaxing to feel each memory and thought that had ever once comprised her identity be stripped away from her. She felt a sensation of impending peace. To death, to sleep, to the unknown oblivion—wherever the destination, she was falling…
A stack of cards spread itself out in a fan before her and revealed the world. She could see the Foundation scrambling to evacuate the area. She could see the GOC detect a burst of Aspect Radiation at a Foundation Site and watched the legion of politicians and hypocrites begin plotting. She saw her family and friends, stumbling through life only marginally more ignorant than they had once been. She saw rain fall on the graves of the people she had killed. All of it was inconsequential.
The doll guided the reshuffling of her layers. She was to be remade into something that would never have to beg its captors for sleeping medications, something that would never begin hyperventilating in a cafeteria, something that would never stay awake waiting for the morning to come. It would be neither better nor worse than her; it would neither be her nor would it not be her. It would only be, and it would belong. She would be made into something that could see the layers of everything for all its complexity and nonsense.
There was an unpleasant moment when the last remaining thing that could be said to be her was destroyed, when she existed only as form without definition, before her parts began to collapse upon themselves, forming layer after layer of a psyche and a body. In this new body she felt the thrill of inhumanity rush through her limbs. She saw the fan of cards and remarked how simple it was to shuffle them around.
As the final layer of what she was to become clicked into place around her, SCP-2156's first and last thought was that all she had wanted was some sleep.


...
Two time travellers sat across the table from one another in matching lab-coats, hands folded, eyeing each other suspiciously. Dr. Thaddeus Xyank pulled his glasses from his face, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and set them back in place.
He had seen it himself. They cordoned off the hallway during school hours on February 2nd, 1954 under the guise of electrical maintenance. In a weathered pair of overalls he stood with arms crossed and watched as two lizards materialized out of thin air and dropped to the ground. He ordered the wing left closed for another three hours, had some panelling replaced, and thanked the principal for his patience before departing for home through the men's room door. That brought the number of organisms recovered up to 84%, and the old story of ‘I don't know what happened' stopped making any kind of sense.
That was 25 minutes and 16, 17, 18 seconds ago.
“Alright,” Thad said, picking up the remote next to him and mashing a button. On the wall, a recording played of D-48120 walking down a dilapidated hallway before suddenly disappearing at the end. It ran on a loop as he spoke. “Here's my problem with your story.”
Researcher Daniel Ambridge, also known as D-48120, let his head hit the desk, and a soft exasperated chuckle escaped his lips.
“One,” Xyank continued. “You're the only sapient being known to have passed through SCP-664 and come back prior to your disappearance.”
“Yes, but you can't very well check on those squirrels, lab rats, and pheasants, can you?” Ambridge said with a smirk.
“Don't interrupt me,” Thad ordered. “Two: yes we can and have checked on all of those squirrels and lab rats and pheasants and terriers and even that pair of anoles you sent out at the same time, and even when they have come back 50 years prior, they all come back to the same geo-relative location. You did not.”
“Well I guess I'm just lucky,” Ambridge replied, head still resting on the table.
“Three,” Thad continued, losing a bit of patience. “Your time at the Foundation, and specifically working on SCP-664, predates all human testing.”
Ambridge stayed silent, but his head came off the table.
“By itself that's not much, but I've checked your logs as well. You briefed every human test subject prior to their exposure, and performed the debriefing of all but…” Thad rolled his eyes up to check his notes briefly. “D-78221, who arrived at 0952 this morning. Now, pardon my saying so, but this confluence of events doesn't look particularly good for you.”
“What are you, a cop?” Ambridge sneered.
“No, I'm a theoretician,” Thaddeus offered. “We're much more precise.”
Mr. Ambridge leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms. Whether it was a personal grudge about his story not being believed, or frustration at two weeks of incessant questioning, scanning, and probing, Thad couldn't tell. “Why would I lie, hm?” Ambridge gestured broadly to the room around him. “You've got me! It doesn't matter what I say, you're not going to let me go. I know the drill. We received the same training, answer to the same people, swore to uphold the interests of the Foundation and its objectives. So what do I have to gain?”
“A method of nearly untraceable escape the moment someone turns a blind eye,” Thad said, very matter-of-factly. He pulled D-78221's deposition from his briefcase and laid it on the table, turning it and sliding it so Ambridge could see. “I have a sworn affidavit saying that our recent arrival was coached by you regarding how to control his temporal displacement prior to his departure.”
“Oh, so he just came back on his own?” Ambridge asked with his eyebrows raised.
“After a week in Atlantic City in 1989, yes.” Dr. Xyank slid the photographs across the table. “Apparently at his debriefing you were supposed to give him the rest of the puzzle?”
Ambridge looked at the photos and said nothing.
“He said something about a ‘white plain'. Said you were going to teach him how to get there from anywhere, but didn't say how. Is that what the debriefing was going to be about?”
Ambridge swallowed and continued to say nothing.
“… Instead, you were actually going to drop a meme in his head and make him forget the whole thing, weren't you? Had to keep yourself unique or the chances of a successful escape later drop close to nil. Please, stop me when I start to go astray; I'm very interested in how this was supposed to work.”
Ambridge looked up at Thad from under a furrowed brow, lips drawn tightly. At this point, he didn't have to say anything. He knew he was fucked.
“Confidentially? I don't even care if you use it, we'll get around to finding you eventually. I just want to know how you plan to do it.”
“Why?” Ambridge spat, crossing his arms. “There's no way I'll get the chance now anyway. What good would it do?”
Dr. Xyank smiled, and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Because I want to know. I'm a theoretician. This is what I do.”
There were two hard knocks on the interrogation room glass, and Thad took to his feet, smoothing out his tie and straightening his coat. “You think about it for a while. If I like your answer we might have a place for you.” Without delay, he walked to the door and was buzzed out. In the dark room on the other side of the mirror, Marcus Kitterman had the phone pressed into his shoulder.
“There's a call from a Dr. Charles Anborough, L4. Said he has something you might want to look at.” Marcus held out the phone. “Line's secure.”
Thad took the receiver and pressed it to his ear. “Hello Dr. Anborough, this is Thad Xyank. What can I do for you?”
“Yes, Dr. Xyank, hello,” came a surprisingly deep voice through the receiver. “I called because… well I may have something relevant to your field of study here, and was looking for your input.”
“What's the initial appraisal?”
The man on the other end of the phone sighed. “Well, there's definitely a temporal element. Looks like a Safe-class SSUIS2 with a fixed temporal dilation pattern. Normally I'd just bag it up but—”
“Then do what you would do normally, Dr. Anborough,” Thad interrupted. “If you absolutely need someone from Temporal Anomalies, I'll be happy to send one of my JR's down there to run the watch test with you. Just now I'm in the middle of an interrogation regarding an anomaly which is much more subtle and difficult to define.”
“SCP-664; I've read. That's why I'm calling. The brief you logged this morning about D-78221? Particularly the excerpt about the ‘infinite white plain'.”
Thad's eyebrows took the liberty of a brief visit to his hairline. “What about it?”
“…I think we've just discovered it.”

“I just don't know…” Charles said, looking solemnly at the fragment of wall in front of them. “I mean… I've seen portals before, of course, but normally there's some kind of method to them.”
“If there was a method, Dr. Anborough, there would be no anomaly,” Thad said, scratching below his nose. The door was not much to look at. Just a little trap door inset in what was left of a wall. Might have been a meat-locker once, or a dumb waiter, but none of that was left now. On the other side, the wall was flat and impenetrable; the repeated grinding of a diamond carbide drill bit had proven it.
“I thought you didn't believe in anomalies,” Charles chuckled.
“I don't, but I'm open to new evidence.” Thad walked up to the door and rapped upon it with his knuckles. It sounded hollow, almost flimsy. “How much analysis have you done on this? Any kind of radiation leakage? Interesting x-ray patterns in the wall? Thaumaturgic signatures?”
Charles shook his head and walked over. “Not a thing. It's clean, it's been stable since we brought it into custody last month, and no anomalies present in the rats we've sent through and back.”
“What about your time signature?” Thad asked. “You said there was some temporal dilation.”
“Stopwatch and camera test says 1 to 140, but only when the door is closed.”
Thad whistled softly. “Quite a ratio. Do we know if it's causally isolated?”
Charles blinked twice. “…I'm sorry, what?”
Thad sighed, and looked around at the debris by his feet. he picked up a piece of charcoal that seemed sufficiently soft and found a blank spot on the wall. “Okay… when the door is closed, we've got a situation that looks kinda like this. One nice straight world-line, the one we're riding…” He quickly marked a long horizontal line. “…And another running in parallel.” With all the art of a 60 year old tenured math professor, Thad drew a tight sinusoid over the first quarter of the horizontal line.

“…You said this thing is safe, right? I'm not going to get some kind of cancer if I put my wrist in there?”
Charles shrugged and shook his head. “A month plus, no incidents. I wouldn't, but—”
Not waiting for him to finish, Thad opened the door and thrust his watch hand inside. The poetic, vast white emptiness on the far side of the door was lost on him. Well, not lost, but surely on hold. He counted seconds and watched the 442i on his wrist keep perfect time with him. “Alright.” The door closed with little ado as he returned to his diagram. “Door opens here, and closes here.” he said, drawing two quick slashes, and then a second straight line above the short stretch of the world line between them. “And apparently, the temporal dilation stops, and the two segments become causally linked.” This, he represented by drawing four dots, evenly spaced, on either side of the two lines. “Then, when the door closes, the dilation resumes as before.”

"With me so far?”
Charles scratched some stubble on his cheek and nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Good. So let's say we… Damn, I need another color.” Thad scanned the ground and found a piece of clay to his liking. He drew a small yellowish stick figure on the line “This person goes through the door, here, and does some thing, I know not what, on the other side.”

“And he doesn't want to stay in there forever, of course.” A brief flash of a memory rocketed across Thad's skull, and he violently shook it away. “So he comes back out.”

“At some point, let's say here on the world line,” and in so saying, Thad flipped the clay and began writing with a much darker red color, “someone with a grudge decides to travel back in time, and kill our man before he ever stepped foot inside the door.”

“We know, of course, that means that our little stick man never lived a life leading up to the door, and never entered it, and the future of the world-line changes instantaneously into a world where the stick man doesn't exist.”

“However, if the dilated region is causally isolated—which it may have to be to preserve a stable dilation ratio—does that erase his presence from the world behind the door? What's more, and perhaps a more important question, does his retrocausal murder prevent his ability to re-emerge later?”

Charles looked at the diagram good and hard for a few minutes, glancing back and forth between it and the expectant eyes of the time traveller standing next to him. It almost made sense. Almost. It seemed like it shouldn't be that way; that if the hypothetical person was wiped from existence on one side of the door, he must be wiped from the other, too. On the other hand, there shouldn't ever be such a door; one which had more time on one side of it than the other. He had read the papers about tachyon field theory, and at the time they seemed to make sense but…
“How would we ever test that?” Charles asked, finally bringing his hand down from his chin. “To us, it just looks like some unidentified anomalous person appeared on the other side and tried to come through. We'd bump the anomaly up to Euclid if it happened once, and probably Keterize it to be certain if it happened more than a dozen times.”
“Well we cou—” Thad started, but did not finish. “Huh… you know you're right. We'd need a third frame of reference to… But we can't do that unless…”
And while the doctors stood in uffish thought, staring at the diagram with their teeth in their mouths, the tiny door inset in the wall shuddered and burst outward. A human arm reached out, flailing for anything it could grab onto. In a snap of adrenaline Thad Xyank and Chuck Anborough jumped backward, drew their sidearms and stepped back double quick, ordering the anomaly to stay right the fuck where it is as bigger men with bigger guns burst into action behind them and moved up. There was a lot of yelling and confusion from the construction crew as another arm came into view, raised in defensive surrender. The docs dropped their muzzles to low ready like clockwork as two guards moved around them and set a bead on whatever hellish thing was daring to feign surrender and draw them closer to its enormous hidden gaping death maw of razor-sharp doom. Still retreating, steady, smooth. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. Blood coming out of the door, and a scared, squirrelly voice they could still hear from 10m away as they holstered the weapons and turned to book it. Any minute now there'd be a vortex or a death howl or a hail of gunfire, and by god they wouldn't be alive to care for long if they stayed this close. They didn't stop until they were 100m away behind a quarter inch steel plate, shepherded around the bend by a hard case in tactical black shouting ‘Go-Go-Move it!-Go!' The whole ordeal was over in less than 20 seconds.
“FUCK!” Charles screamed as he folded at the waist, propped up on his knees eyes plastered shut. A decade working with Keters puts the fear in you. After handling the unhandleable, training that can get you over the wall to safety is all you can really ask for. “Fucking safe class! This was my vacation project!” The pinky-side of his fist struck the plate of steel as he slid down to the ground.
Thad raked a hand down his face and took a deep breath. Stupid. Fucking stupid. Fucking academic stupidity of the highest order and thank god he had gotten re-certified this month. He had put his hand in that thing! And then just stood around next to an active anomaly drawing curly-q's and stick figures. If he had wanted to discuss a subtle variant of the grandfather paradox he— … Wait a minute.
“…You know, it is rather convenient, isn't it? Us standing there, talking about how if it worked, we'd never know the difference, and not a minute later an unidentified humanoid busts through the door?” Thad said, the smallest hint of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“This is Captain Crawford, come back Rally 2?” the radio on the nearest guard squawked.
“Rally 2 here,” the guard answered.
“Situation under control. Unidentified humanoid in custody. We're uh… We'll be maintaining a 10m radius around the object.”
“Understood,” the guard replied and raised his voice to address all the other poor schmucks at Rally 2 that everything was fine, and just to be safe, don't cross the tape unless you have someone to hold your hand for you.
“Hey stop me if you've heard this one before,” another voice came over a nearby radio. “The Skip says he knows who we are, and wants to talk to someone from ‘Delta-Tee'.”
“…What are you saying?” Charles asked as the sanity crept back into his stare.
“I'm saying… I'd like permission to interview your detainee,” Dr. Xyank replied. “You know. Just in case.”

Agent Burt Tomlin's head was in his hands as he heaved a heavy sigh. From the corner of his eye he spied the interrogation room mirror, and silently asked his reflection why he had agreed to come in so damn early this morning. “So, let me get this straight…” Burt continued, turning his attention back to the unkempt, red-haired, befreckled HCP-1 across the table. “Your name is Kevin McDougal, and you're some kind of time-travelling Foundation Agent, sent from the future to test…what did you say again?”
“Yeah. Well… I mean, no. I'm a Junior Researcher under Dr. Thaddeus Xyank of Research and Containment Team Δ-t. I was working with him trying to link two known anomalies, SCP-664 and SCP-2400.”
“Uh huh…” Tomlin said, rolling his eyes. “Even though we haven't got a 2400?”
“Yes, but you will! For Christ's sake, it's where I was picked up!” McDougal exclaimed, shaking his hands in the air. “We were interrogating a Daniel Ambridge about 664 when Dr. Xyank got a call from… someone, I don't know who, about 2400. Based on the information we had, we decided to test if they were connected by sending me through. That was April 10, 1998.”
“Right, right,” Tomlin said, taking a sip of coffee. “Except… I gotta tell you, this sounds like a pretty gross breach of protocol. If what you're saying is true this… What was that name?”
“Thaddeus. Xyank.”
“That's it. This ‘Xyank' character…he'd have to be a pretty big wheel. If you were a JR, you'd know cross-tests are almost never approved. And sending someone with a clearance through it? I mean, why wouldn't he just use a D to do it?” Tomlin said, feigning disinterest.
McDougal rubbed his eyebrows and shook his head. “He said he needed someone he could trust.”
“Of course he did,” Tomlin said into his mug, hoping after the fact that it was too soft for the mark to hear. Another slip-up like that and he might give something away. “And why did he trust you?”
“He hired me and my buddy Marcus right out of grad school! I've worked with him for over three years on all kinds of temporal anomalies.”
“Oh yeah, where was that?”
“Ithaca State,” McDougal replied. “…You know, the one in New York?” He was clearly losing his patience.
“Easy there, wise-ass,” Tomlin said with a sneer. “No one likes this process, but mouthing off to me isn't bound to win you any favors.”
Two knocks on the interrogation room glass and Tomlin perked his head up. “…Alright Mr. McDougal, you just sit tight a minute.”
Outside the room Marcus Kitterman was a wet dog, soaked to the skin in sweat. Thad Xyank had his arms crossed, brow furrowed, and lips pasted together in a thin black line. “Chuck Anborough just called,” Thad said, eyes not leaving the kid in the hot-seat. “O5-8 just designated SCP-2400.”
“Jesus,” Tomlin said, head hanging loose on his neck. “What about this shit with 664?”
“It's legit,” Thad said, still stolid. “I had that conversation three days ago. He said he went through on the 10th?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Thad said, nodding. “I mean, it sounds like me. It seems like something I'd want to test, but I never expected to have an actual paradox on my hands. We still have a week to track him down. We can still send the original through if we need to.”
Kitterman shook his head violently. “Noooo you can't.”
“Oh? Pray tell why not?” Thad asked impatiently.
“…What he says is right. We knew each other in grad-school. And high school. And kindergarten. Kevin and I are like best friends. They used to call us ‘cookies and cream',” he said chuckling. “…He's about the only one I kept in touch with after I was hired. I figured it was alright, since he got all the way to the live interview, like I had, but… You remember that week I took off last March?”
“Spit it out, Marcus,” Tomlin demanded.
“He's dead, okay? I went to the funeral, I saw his body. He was on his way to work one morning and a car cut him off, broke his neck.” Kitterman was very nearly in tears, and Tomlin very nearly felt like a heel.
The color drained from Thad's face as it came to him. This was a situation he could not win. The child on the other side of the one-way glass, if genuine, was the end of history as mankind knew it. Dr. Xyank was in a position now that required history to change in order for history to be preserved. How does one maintain the status quo when the status quo is in indeterminate flux? Which status quo do you preserve? Without thinking, he turned to a nearby computer console, pulling up his notes on Kitterman's hiring process and who was brought on at the same time and wouldn't you know it? There was Kevin McDougal. His application had a note written in red pen in the upper right hand corner.

Possible connection to undiscovered anomalies. Do Not Hire
-Tx

Thad knew that name sounded familiar somehow.
“It looks legitimate,” he said softly, turning back to the window and resting his forehead against it as Kitterman and Tomlin looked at the screen and shared nervous laughter.
Kevin McDougal, Age 32. A young man whose life, as he knew it, never happened. And never could happen.

From: thaddeus.xyank@foundation.net
To: o5-12@foundation.net
CC: athena.anastasakos@foundation.net; marcus.kitterman@foundation.net; bertrand.tomlin@foundation.net
Subject: Re:Frame of Reference Proposal
You are correct, continuing experimentation along these lines will necessarily alter the course of history, and perhaps in unpredictable ways. However, as demonstrated in previous attachments, there is sufficient reason to believe that the interactions between SCP-664 and SCP-2400 have already caused such an alteration. Whether this was done intentionally by an alternate iteration of myself or occurred naturally is irrelevant.
The purpose of this proposal is not to give myself or the Temporal Anomalies Department carte blanche to run amok about time flipping switches and pulling levers. The mission of RCT Δ-t will remain unaltered from that put forth in our previous discussion, until such time as sufficient evidence is collected to warrant a re-visiting of those goals.
All I'm requesting is that you allow me to create a stable, static causality, immune from the effects of causal tampering. From this external time-line we will be able to meaningfully measure the rate or frequency of historic shifts, as well as allowing agents on temporal retrieval or research missions to have a stable home base to which they may return. The genie is already out of the bottle, so to speak. If we ever mean to put it back in, we have to be able to track its movements first.
Thank you for this consideration.
Thaddeus Xyank, PhD.
Temporal Anomalies Department Chairperson
thaddeus.xyank@foundation.net | Ext. 1780

From: o5-12@foundation.net
To: thaddeus.xyank@foundation.net
CC: athena.anastasakos@foundation.net; marcus.kitterman@foundation.net; bertrand.tomlin@foundation.net
Subject: Re:Frame of Reference Proposal
This request has been approved by a 7-5 decision.
Do not make me regret my vote, Thaddeus.
O5-12

…

Part Three: Erstwhile and Again | Hub | Part Five: Document 1780-WL


☦An accidental sorcery. AWCY as a latent phenomenon.☦
I used to see abstracts, nonsense, but somehow I understood. It was an instinct, an intuition; less like the bird knowing to build a nest, more like the twigs knowing how to become one. There was something magical to the way I interfaced with it. Each piece was a tiny fragment of the universe, and some of them hinted about it, or had a vignette from its history. A shattered mirror, twinkling in impossible hues. These things were intentional and accidental and incidental and absolute, and sometimes I found some occult wisdom lying around in the street.
Have you heard of the elephant that did abstract paintings? I went to visit it at the zoo because I thought that was interesting. I surprised myself. I'm cynical and I usually pass those things off, but I went and watched the elephant paint. I thought it was clever. The paintings gave me happy feelings, so much so that I bought one.
I hung new paintings up facing my bed. It helped me absorb them since they were the last and first thing I saw every day. I liked to think they influenced my dreams. I had a single dream during this painting's stint on the back wall. This dream was mostly colour. Colour, memory, and a strong taste of copper. There were no words, or sound, or touch, simply being… or, perhaps, simply not. This dream was different. I woke up excited.
I experienced. Trillions of people converging, dancing across vast distances, finally disappearing into a vanishing point. In the end I opened my eyes to see the elephant's painting past the foot of my bed. In that context, the painting made sense. The elephant, I thought, must have had the same dream.
Other things made weird sense to me. I saw a broken mirror in a restroom. I felt that if I stayed long enough the person on the other side might start talking to me. Of course that didn't happen, but when I fell asleep I could see Earth through a looking glass; tumbling evermore down an endless rabbit hole.
The girl next-door. Every day she left the building with a mischievous smile on her face. I can't describe what I saw that night; but I woke in the morning with pins and needles down my throat. I felt like we saw it together.
One day I saw her leave with a man who smiled the same smile, and I thought I wouldn't see her for a long time after that.
I saw holes in a tightly stretched canvas. On the pavement there were spots of light where moths had eaten away. In my dreams I heard beams of light twisting through space; I saw screaming echoes of glorious tulips. My eyelids parted to taste the sun.
I wondered about the girl I saw earlier; Did the sun's gaze flow into her apartment, too?
I looked for answers.
Her room was completely furnished, knick knacks and all. Was she whisked away? Did she die? All that was left there were her memories and my approximation of them. I could see from her textbooks that she was studying economics, and that she went to the local college. A framed photo of a man who certainly wasn't the man I saw her with before. Who was the other man? The man in the photo looked like it was her boyfriend. I figured it was so.
I didn't dream that night. I saw nothing like a singularity, or a single pillar of light, or a broken reflection. I expected that I was on some sort of trail, and that was where the next clue would be. What I thought was magic turned out to be a day trip in my head, and here I was trespassing on someone else's life.
No more dreams. I got tired of the little bits of stellar history lying around my studio apartment. I got cynical again. I resented the elephant painting and the cosmic mystery I imagined.
Then the girl was back. I just glimpsed her turning a corner one day, and I could hear her arguing on the floor below me. When I left yesterday morning, she was screaming at someone in the hallway.
This isn't the same!
It was the man in the photo. She turned around and started crying. The man seemed frustrated and scared. He looked a lot like her.
Why isn't this the same?
The man she left with long ago turned the corner with a middle aged woman.
She's not smiling.
The pair kissed at the foot of the stairs.
Why isn't she smiling?
The girl screamed at her brother, then seized and kissed him.
This is not her world.
Endorphins swam around in my head. I began to grin. I cried and laughed and I didn't care about the looks they gave me. This was an accident. A masterpiece. I performed a miracle.
I understood how we exist in their memory… and other people exist in ours. My memories of her were wrong, but now they are absolute.
That night I could hardly sleep, but I dreamed. I dreamed of the things escaping into a distant spot. I saw them funnel out of the other end. They were screaming, crude reflections of what they were. I woke up and lay staring at the ceiling, lightheaded.
I disposed of some garbage; my room was empty but for the paintings. Happy little elephant scribblings all over the walls and roof and floor. I went to the zoo and I purchased every single painting they had and the brilliant splashes of colour were everything.
It is a fine thing to be a patron of the arts.
I went to sleep and I woke up and between the two was everything. The girl lived with her brother and the man had moved away. She cried and he cried and they cried because the world was not their own and they knew it.
I started to make art of my own. I bought some paint and some horsehair paintbrushes and some gloriously beautiful white paper and I started to apply some colour, but they didn't mix the right way and it all came out wrong.
I went to sleep and I woke up and the green light of the sun flowed through every window. Meanwhile the universe tried to make sense of my art, so the girl next door and the boyfriend that was the brother sat and giggled and looked into each other's eyes and saw nothing but each others' retinas. The elephant paintings covered the roof and the floor and the walls and the sink and the lights and my clothes and my flesh and the world.
I wish I could paint like the elephant did.
I went to sleep and I woke up and my dreams were pyrite and sulphur. The boyfriend and his sister smiled and grinned and skipped in tune. I picked up the horsehair paintbrush with my trunk and flayed the flesh of the rough-hewn canvas with whips laced with black and blue and red and a shade of being that words are not enough for.
I went to sleep and I woke up and my paintings were not enough and so I took a brush to myself and painted my grey skin and the blue light of the sun on my indigo paint mixed with the red of the coupling next door and it all mixed into a single hue and had the consistency of vomit twice removed.
I went to sleep and I woke up.
I went to sleep and I woke up.
I went to sleep and I woke up.
I went to sleep.
Uncountable infinities of light swam into impossible oneness. An errant thought: wouldn't it be nice to dance among the fairies? The lights cackled and shone and whispered foreign words down my throat and the words became mine and the world felt like nothing.
I disappeared into the distance and never woke up.


A tall girl walked along the shore of the beach carrying a green glass bottle. Inside the bottle was a note she wrote. She walked into the water and threw the bottle as far as she could.
She had done this countless times over the past few years, and every time the bottle returned to her in the next day with another note from someone she had come to think of as a friend.
The girl returned home to wait for the message from her friend. She collected copies of the notes she has received inside a USB drive and thrown away the physical copies so as to not attract her parents' attention.
As the girl went to bed, she wondered about the place her friend lives in and about what she must be like. She has received notes describing everything from the weather and the plants to the people and animals. All of these varied in description but seemed to have come from a child's mind. The girl had a hard time believing most of what she was told, but then again, she had exchanged messages like this for the last few years. Sometimes she suspected that none of that was true, and that she was simply the victim of a prank or the correspondent of a person with a troubled mind and too much free time.
She fell asleep and dreamed of the possibility of visiting another world.

The next day's first rays of sunshine touched the girl's face through the window of her room. She opened her eyes and looked around, trying to remember her dream. She could recall crossing the ocean on the back of a rainbow colored dolphin and reaching a gigantic island-city in the middle of nowhere. She flew through streets and saw curved, pastel colored houses and people selling everything from dancing plants to a baby's first laughter. The dream ended as she touched the knob of the front door of a house that she knew belonged to her friend.
Still somewhat sleepy, the girl got up from her bed and noticed that it was still 6:30 in the morning. She knew her parents were still sleeping, so she changed her clothes and went down the stairs from her room quietly. She left the house and headed straight to the beach to see if the bottle had returned.
Sure enough, it was there when she arrived, just like always. She ran excitedly and grabbed the bottle from the sand. She used the bottle opener she brought with her and took out a rolled up paper, a necklace and some seeds from inside the bottle. She unrolled it and read the message, written with what seemed to be a typewriter.

Hi Jane. So, you are turning fifteen? That's great! Happy birthday to you! About your question regarding what kind of things I saw people selling during this year's Rebirth Celebration, it was wonderful! There were these sweet red fruits called holiboms that fill your mouth with smoke that you can spit out and then control their shapes and directions with your thoughts. There were also emerald sculptures for decorating lawns, several types of horned ice beasts from the Frozen South, necklaces made of large seeds which you could ask to paint with any drawing you wanted and many pop-up books with tiny sound machines.
I also saw people from some of the poorer neighborhoods helping each other pay for some products by making a spectacle a few days before. They gathered in a plaza and reenacted the Third Great War's final conflict in the Wild Daimojo Plains. The people interpreting the Warrok army wore leather masks and some home-made armor painted so well that it looked it was made of real steel! I almost cried during the scene in which they showed the soldiers of the various regions mourning their fallen comrades.
These were the new things I saw. The rest you know, although I didn't see anyone selling those dancing flowers you said you liked so much. They say the gardens where they grow those were attacked by fire bats. They have been reproducing like crazy lately, but no one knows why. Some think it has something to do with the smoke released by the lightning works. That hasn't been confirmed, however. I don't know much about chemistry, so I can't tell you if that is plausible or not, but if it's true, the government should create a law forbidding their use, or at least demanding new formulas. Those damn bats are harming the businesses and crops of everyone, and safety should come before fun, don't you think?
Inside the bottle is one the necklaces I told you about. You said you like flowers, so I got one with flower drawings for your birthday. There are also some seeds and instructions for you to grow your own holibom tree. Well, that's all. Until next time!

Jane rolled up the note and put it back inside the bottle. She hurried back home and added the new note to her pen drive and stored away her birthday gifts. She quickly wrote a response and put it inside the bottle. She then went back to the beach and tossed it into the ocean. Since it was a Saturday, she returned home and went back to sleep.

The bottle drifted through the ocean for some time before disappearing. It reappeared on the red shores of another world's beach. An old woman walked up to it an picked it up. She opened it and unrolled the note.

Hi Gedril! Thank you for wishing me a happy birthday and giving me this wonderful gift! This year's Rebirth Celebration sounds like it was a lot of fun! I'm just sad to know they aren't selling the dancing flowers. I agree with you, they really should make those laws if that is true. My parents are taking me to Disneyland this year to commemorate my fifteen years! Once we come back, I'll send you some pictures of Disneyland.

The old woman smiled and put the note back inside the bottle. She returned to her S-shaped, blue and pink house on a street filled with similar letter shaped homes covered in pastel colors.
She opened the front door and went to the room where she kept all of Jane's letters, organized neatly by date. She wrote a response, threw the bottle into the ocean and went back to her home.
The old woman then went to her kitchen and prepared some tea. Someone knocked on her door.
She went to answer it and was greeted by two identical men equipped from head to toe in fishing gear.
"Well, hi Galbo and Ridnim! Going to watch some birds, I presume?" She laughed at her own joke.
"Nope! Good guess, though!" replied the man on the left.
"We're going to the Beauties' Lake to fish. Wanna come with us?" invited the man on the right.
"Oh, I am sorry boys, but it'll be dark soon, and you know what the night's air does to me."
The men looked at each other and sighed simultaneously.
"Really, Gedril?" asked the man on the right. "You don't have to stay for the whole trip if you don't want to. You can leave any time you want. Let's catch at least one fish!" he insisted.
"I'd love to, but today is the last day I have to return some books I haven't finished, and I don't want to pay any fines," said Gedril.
"Ok then. We'll invite you to go fishing during the morning next time," said the man on the left.
"Of course, that sounds much better," answered Gedril.
"Alright then. We're leaving."
"Have fun with your books."
The men turned around and walked away, once again simultaneously.
Gedril closed the door. This was not the first time she had been invited to something she couldn't go to due to her condition, and it wouldn't be the last. She sighed and returned to the kitchen to finish her tea. After she was done, she picked up a history book, sat on an armchair and started reading.
As she read, she could see the day's light slowly starting to go away. She felt nervous and read faster to finish the book. She didn't make it, however, and had to leave her house and go to the library. She returned the book without talking much to the librarians and returned home as fast as possible. When she arrived, Gedril was sweating and panting. She looked at her wrist watch. It was 6:57 in the afternoon.
She locked all the doors, closed the curtains, took off her clothes, went to her room and waited. Only three minutes left until it started like it did every day.
When the room's watch hit 7:00, Gedril began to feel it. She started to convulse and sweat intensely. She felt an itch through her whole body, as if ants were crawling over her. Long strand of purple hair came out of her skin. Soon, Gedril was covered in so much purple hair that she looked like an overgrown, human shitzu.
Gedril slowly opened her eyes and looked around. There would be a lot of hair to clean up the next day.
She picked up another book and sat on an armchair. She carefully opened it and flipped the pages, having a bit of difficulty due to her hairy fingers. She read until she felt tired and went to bed.

The next day, Gedril woke up as a normal person, as she always did. She cleaned up the hair, went to the beach and saw the bottle on the sand. She picked it up and read the note.
It was from Jane. It said that she and her family had some problems and couldn't go to Disneyland this time, so there were no pictures. Gedril replied as she usually did. This cycle repeated itself for several days. Gedril noted something strange about the notes she received. Jane started asking questions that she normally wouldn't and used words that she didn't before.
Little did Gedril know, Jane no longer remembered anything about her. Jane had forgotten to follow the instructions for the holibom trees thoroughly one day. The tree ripped itself from the soil and started walking around on its roots through the neighborhood, alerting a group of strange men who came to Jane's house asking about the bottle.

A year passed without any messages for Gedril. The people she met during her daily activities noticed the missing playful spark in her eyes. When they asked if something was wrong, Gedril insisted that she was fine. She eventually stopped participating in the weekly chess and poker games with her neighbors. When she was invited to the wedding of a baker's daughter, she accepted, even though she only wanted to stay inside her house. When the daughter and her husband finally kissed each other, Gedril cried again. She told people it was because she was happy for them.
One day, while walking through the streets as she usually did, Gedril arrived at a port. She decided to stay and watch the men work and the ships come and go. She wondered if they would ever let her inside one of those ships and take her to wherever it was that Jane lived. Gedril knew it was impossible, however, and soon went back to her home.
She read some books without much interest, trying to push away her painful thoughts. The night came and she went to sleep. Gedril dreamed that she was in a new and wonderful world. In this world, she finally met Jane and all of her friends and family. They didn't even mind it when Gedril showed them her condition.
They would remain only dreams.

Gedril woke up with the sun's first rays touching her face. She didn't want to get up. She didn't want to do anything. Unfortunately, she remembered that she had remained in her house for so many days that she really needed to go to the grocery. She got up without any energy in her movements and left the house. After buying what she needed Gedril went back home and sat in her armchair.
For some time she couldn't count, Gedril simply remained there and thought. She began to feel as if someone was squeezing her heart and the tears began to fall. She sobbed and convulsed as the tears kept falling. Without the will to do anything but sleep, she went to bed.
This would repeat for the following weeks, and Gedril's health would slowly deteriorate. One day she began manifesting worrying symptoms. She went to a doctor, who told Gedril that she had a brain tumor and that she probably wouldn't live more than a month.
Gedril left the hospital with her spirit crushed and went back home. She thought of something Jane had once told her. "Our time on this world is short, and we never know when our last day will be". These words kept repeating themselves inside her head, until she could take it no more and made a decision. She would not go as someone who had surrendered to sorrow. She went looking for people who needed help in any way and eventually found a charity center. She worked there for the following month and quickly made many friends.
One day, while returning from the center at night, Gedril felt a strange sensation inside her head. She called all the friends and family she had and thanked them for all they had done for her.
She went to sleep and silently passed away.


As he placed the last of his possessions in a box, an elderly man with a walnut cane gave one last look around the room. His name was Dr. Zachary Johnson, and the office he had worked in for the last 35 years was now empty, save for the furniture he had been given by the Foundation. It had been a good run while it had lasted. He had been the primary investigator on six items and had been a major contributor to at least twelve others. But alas, it was time to retire, and, with a melancholy smile, Dr. Johnson turned off the lights in his little sandbox and stepped out into the adjoining lab.
As soon as he had entered, Johnson's ears were immediately treated to frantic mumbling, the source being a man at a desk in the corner rapidly sifting through paperwork. This man's name was Jacob Conwell, and he had been Johnson's assistant for the last three years. Johnson quietly chuckled to himself as the man shuffled and reshuffled through stacks of papers, his ramblings becoming more and more disjointed as time went on. Eventually, Johnson gave a small cough, Conwell freezing and looking up from his paperwork only to have his face drain of color when he saw Johnson's smiling face.
“Dr. Johnson, I'm sorry to say that I won't have those last few files ready in time. I'm still waiting on Clayton to email me that transcript, and…” Conwell nervously sputtered his words, stopping only when Johnson held up his hand for silence.
“It's quite all right.” Johnson said with a smile. He then walked over to the desk and quickly glanced over several folders that had already been neatly set aside. “Everything else is squared away, though, I hope?”
“Of course,” Johnson's assistant replied with a nod.
“Excellent.” Johnson then looked around the room. He chuckled to himself as he made a circular gesture with his cane. “I've been informed that they are handing the lab over to you for continued research on 1360-1. Looks like you're king of the castle now.” Johnson watched as Conwell frowned.
“So I was told…”
“You've done a good job so far,” Johnson said as he patted his assistant on the shoulder, “and like I said, I imagine you'll continue to do a good job in the future. I've taught you everything I know, and, given enough time, I imagine you'll be able to get 1360 talking again. I don't think there is anyone more suited to the job.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that, Dr. Johnson.” Conwell held out his hand, which Johnson shook enthusiastically.
“It was a pleasure to work for you.”
Johnson nodded in agreement. He was going to miss his lab, almost as much as would miss working with his assistants. Johnson then glanced at his watch and made a gesture towards the door.
“Shall we head to the party then?”

“I think I safely speak for everyone here when I say that we appreciate your service to the Foundation, Dr. Johnson, and that Site-19 will not be the same without you.”
The lunchroom filled with applause as Dr. Gregg Collins finished his speech. Shortly thereafter, the numerous personnel who had come for the cake and refreshments returned to their individual conversations. Every now and then, one of them would come up and congratulate him on his retirement, but for the most part, Johnson idled away at his own table with Conwell as he casually listened in on the chat that filled the room.
Truth be told, most of the individuals that Johnson had considered his friends had long vanished from the Foundation, either dead, retired or both. Now Site-19 was filled with new faces, and Johnson couldn't help but chuckle to himself for how old it made him feel.
“Something funny?” Collins asked as he approached the table and took a seat.
“The day finally came,” Johnson replied. “I honestly thought I would have been killed long ago.”
“We certainly had our close calls,” Collins said with a grin, “I hate to see you go. We had so many adventures.”
Johnson had worked with Collins on five collaborated projects. To his knowledge, those objects that were not being reassigned to his assistant were to be assigned to him.
“You'll have plenty of tales of your own by the time you retire,” Johnson smirked. “Exciting ones too, considering how you won't have me around to pull your ass out of the fire.” The two men laughed quietly, but before long fell silent.
“Is Freemont going to play ball?” Collins asked. His expression had become solemn.
“She is.” Johnson said with a sad sigh. “I had to call in every favor I had left, but I've been allowed one last ten minute ‘psychological health' visit. You'll look after him when I'm gone, won't you?”
“Of course.” Collins nodded in agreement. He then gave a quick look around. Now that the cake and refreshments were gone, the party was already starting to wind down. “I don't think you're needed here any longer if you'd like to get that out of the way.”
Johnson gave a small smile and nodded. Without another word, the two men shook hands and Johnson departed.

Site-19 humanoid containment cells were not known for their comfort, especially the one in which Dr. Harold Thompson was contained. Four gray walls, a cot, a sink, a toilet, and the knowledge that someone was watching you from the other side of a one-way mirror embedded in the wall by the door. Harold looked himself over in this mirror as he sat on the cot. The dark rings around his eyes suggested he had not slept for several years.
“Dr. Thompson, please put your gloves back on and remain on the cot,” said the voice of a security agent over the intercom. Harold looked down at his now upturned hands. Following the accidental release and inhalation of an unknown particulate from an experimental object Harold had been working on, any time he touched living biological tissue, he caused it to turn into solid marble. Reluctantly, Harold hid his deadly mitts in a pair of leather gloves he had been given. Shortly thereafter, the cell door opened and an elderly man with a walnut cane slowly entered. He took a seat at Harold's desk and turned with a small smile.
“It's been a while, Zach.”
“It sure has,” Johnson agreed, watching as Harold looked nervously at the one-way mirror and then back to him. Johnson gave a sad nod. Dr. Freemont, the researcher in charge of Harold's object file, was watching their every move.
“How's your new assistant treating you?” Harold inquired. Before he had been given his own assignments, Harold had worked with Dr. Johnson for close to five years. It had been a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
“Well, he's not you and he's a bit of a pest at times, but he gets the job done at the end of the day,” Johnson replied.
“Ah,” Harold mumbled. A silence fell over the room. “I heard they threw you a great retirement party. I wish I could have been there.”
“I do too.” Johnson's smile began to fade. He then turned his attention to several photographs that lined the top shelf of the book case, each depicting the same woman and boy at various ages before ending with a picture of the boy's wedding day. “Lisa says that Jack and Elizabeth are trying to have a baby.”
“Is that so?” Harold said softly. Johnson knew he had always wanted to be a grandfather. “I'm sure Lisa will make a fantastic grandmother.”
“She still misses you terribly, you know?” Johnson added. “Jack too. Every time I see them, the conversation always ends up on you.”
Harold didn't respond, but rather gave a small melancholy smile as he gazed at the floor.
“You'll still keep an eye on them, won't you?” He asked.
“As often as I can.” Johnson replied. “I've had Collins promise to relay any new photos to you.”
Harold nodded in appreciation. The two men once again fell silent. Before long, Johnson stood and made his way towards the door.
“Thank you for everything you've done for me over the years, Zach. I'd hug you if I could.” Harold stood. His smile morphed into a small regretful frown.
“I appreciate that,” Johnson said and smiled.
Quietly Johnson exited, turning to give a small nod on his way out the door. Without another word, Dr. Johnson grabbed his box of personal items and left Site-19 forever.

Part One | Peregrine | Part Two: Simple Sketches


She had a ritual that she always performed when approaching her meals. First, she laid out the pristine white cloth napkin and placed the implements upon it. Second, she poured the cup of water for use as a palate cleanser between courses. Third, she opened the lunchbox to inspect the food and select the first entrée. This time, she decided to start with some fried pork dumplings, with a small container of soy sauce on the side. Fourth, she took the first bite and savored.

Oh god, she's finally here. It's finally happening. First day at college. First time away from her family. She's already on the verge of a panic attack. Her clonazepam was in her bathroom kit, god where is it, she needs to take a dose right now or she'll freak out now that her parents had left her.
Okay, okay, there it is, good, good. Dry swallow one of the pills and sit and wait until it kicks in.
Shit, someone's unlocking the door?! Who is it?! Oh, wait, roommate. That's right, she had a roommate now. Can't freak out on her first thing, appearances are important, first impressions are important, can't make her think she was a nutso or anything. The door's opening, stay calm.
"Hi! I'm Janine, your roommate—" Tired-looking girl with her parents behind her, maybe they had to drive a long way? "Uh, do you need help bringing stuff in?"
The trio look at her and she feels her ears start to burn.
The new roommate says, "Yeah, could you hold the door open while we carry this in? We're parked at a meter, so we want to make this as fast as possible."
Okay, first impression seems okay. Not actively hostile anyway. Maybe this can work.
"Sure! I'll come down and help with the next load."

Ah, a college experience. Delicious. Expectation and excitation and nostalgia wrapped together with just a soupçon of longing to add that wonderful aftertaste. Stressful without leaving a bad taste in the mouth.
She took a sip of water to clear her mouth and the contemplated the next course. Perhaps a little of both sweet and sour. She removed the perfect, ripe orange from the lunchbox and began to peel it slowly, letting the intense citrus smell engage her as she collected the rind in a small pile. She idly considered turning that into a marmalade for later enjoyment. Finally, she gently sectioned the orange and brought the first wedge to her lips. As she took a bite, she was pleased to note that it was the perfect amount of both tartness and sweet.

Her face aches from smiling so much. A pleasant ache, one of joy and happiness, the kind that reminds you that everything can be perfectly good. Is this what people mean when they say that they're deliriously happy?
It's hard to believe that Jesse loves her, too. She's never known anyone as fun and kind as him, and she loves him dearly. Going to the basketball team's first home game with him sounds kind of silly as a first "official" date, but they both like the university's team this year and besides which, they met at a game anyway, so it's good luck.
What to wear, what to wear? Casual, since it's a game, not a fancy dinner, but not too casual; don't want to make it look like she doesn't care about looking nice for him. The "nice" jeans and a red hoodie should be perfect. Just a little makeup, gotta get ready to meet him in the dorm lobby and oh! He's already waiting for her, a silly grin on his face, too.
This is going to be a perfect night out with him, isn't it.

She was slightly and pleasantly surprised to have more college experiences; usually her meals elicited unrelated enjoyments. She was also somewhat puzzled as to why this time she only had a single emotional note instead of something more… complex. She wasn't disappointed, per se, but more curious as she considered the situation. She absently ate another orange wedge, savoring the burst of juice across her tongue.

The deep glow of her love and affection for Jesse warms her heart whenever she thinks about him. Gotta work on biochem homework but it's hard keeping her mind off him, especially with that Valentine's Day bouquet sitting right there. It's even her favorite flower, daisies, instead of roses, and they're still in full bloom in the vase he'd made for her in his pottery class.
Still, school is important, really really need to buckle down and focus. At least her roommate Kelly is listening to her music on headphones tonight, so the Europop she likes isn't filling the room.
Gah! Why's Kelly shaking her shoulder? She'd just gotten into the zone! Wait, it's been an hour already? Sheesh.
"Huh? What's up?"
"Beth is here and wants to talk with you. Something happened but she won't tell me what."
Thoughts of her homework are instantly vaporized by the sudden grip of fear in her stomach. The R.A. is standing in the doorway, looking… worried? What the heck?
"Uh, Kelly? Can you leave us alone for a few minutes?" asks Beth.
Kelly looks nervously between the two of them. "Sure. I'll be over in the lounge if you need me."
Kelly leaves and Beth takes a deep breath and tells her, "I'm so sorry. Jesse was in an accident a couple of hours ago. Someone was speeding and hit him as he was crossing the street. His R.A.—"
Beth continues speaking, but what's she saying? The words are fading away and don't make any sense. This can't be happening. Jesse's okay, right? God wouldn't hurt someone as nice as him, right? I mean, at least it could just be that Jesse—
"—is in critical condition at the hospital. I figured you'd want to know." Beth's just standing there, so awkwardly. Doesn't she know that something monumentally terrible has happened? Jesse's hurt, Jesse might die and oh god did she tell him she loved him when she saw him earlier? What kind of witch would she be if he… passed away… not knowing that she loved him everyday forever and ever?
"Janine? Do you want me to drive you over to the hospital?" Beth gently laid a hand on her shoulder, which immediately jerked like a rubber band snapping. Nope, can't handle that, no touching right now. Gotta, shit, gotta get it together.
"Yes, yes, I need to go there right now. My wallet, where's my wallet? And my keys? And should I bring something? I mean, they won't let me bring flowers I don't think and that's kind of tacky anyway and oh god what if his parents are there they'd think I was crazy bringing him flowers while he's so bad off and oh god I just can't."
Why is her face wet? Oh god, is she crying in front of someone? She can't look weak, not when she has to be strong for Jesse. That's right, just wipe it off, grab the purse and go.

Ah, that was better. A strong sense of happiness with that sudden burst of despair at the end, sparking off each other in a delightful interplay. Definitely a better bite than the first, and worth the wait.
And now that the orange was finished, it was time for another sip of water, then on to the last course: a double shot of espresso. If she was lucky, it would complete the set in a wonderfully complementary way. Now, the decision was whether to sip it slowly and draw out the experience, or down it quickly for something more intense.
Intensity would be a perfect capstone to the meal, though.

That motherfucker is just standing there. He's not even upset. How dare he walk around living and whole when Jesse is dead? How DARE he?!
Well, he won't be for much longer, he's going to get what's coming to him, isn't he? Bet he doesn't expect someone to tap him on the shoulder from behind and—
"Yes?"
BLAM

Oh, exquisite! Short and intense, just as expected! And such a wonderful vignette, too! Perhaps she should try her little experiment again to see if she could elicit any similar results.
Smiling faintly, she waited until her heartbeat slowed, then unhurriedly collected her trash into a small plastic bag and put in all in the lunchbox, on top of the small vial containing a sliver of preserved brain tissue. Lunch completed, she returned her lunchbox to her locker, then walked back over to scrub back in before starting the next autopsy.
A coroner's work is never done. A gourmet's pleasure, even less so.