The Woman in the Boxes - SCP Foundation

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Explicit depiction of sexual acts.

Features non-consensual sexual acts.

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The Woman in the Boxes

You are the artist. Hello, the artist.

You open the door.

You aren't sure what you expected to find on the other side, but this isn't it. Row after row on shelf over shelf of boxes full to bursting with… well, take one down and take a look. Take down a dozen. Take them all down. They're yours.

Sketches, illustrations, half-baked notions and snippets of description, that's what the boxes are full of. Much of the art and florid language is in your hand, and the rest at least has your fingerprints on it. The first box you open features a margin-scrawled scribble, a re-drawn meme, a few pieces that would make an anatomist blush, a sheaf of very artistic and professional-looking renderings, and one extremely crude digital art likeness, the only thing in this box you didn't produce yourself. The anatomy here is dubious, the colour balance murky and the flourish nonexistent, but still it produces its effect on you. It was the first.

It also doesn't even exist anymore, anywhere else. It looks kind of like this, but a whole lot worse:

You've re-rendered this woman in this outfit more times than she ever canonically wore it, enough times that the image makes you feel proprietorial, amateurish as the foreign original might be. That other artist didn't manage much, but they did manage to capture some sense of the beauty, power, confidence, arrogance of their subject. Even in its vague and untutored first formulation, before you got your hands on it and gave it a practiced twist, you could and still can see that the woman in this image is a woman who would cheerfully choke a bitch.

You don't feel guilty for the thrill of that thought. Not in here, where it's only you girls.

The other boxes are much the same. Patterns for a doll. Studies of a spindly-fingered hand. White-crested waves of cool blue hair — light blue is white on white, dark blue is black on white, art is weird sometimes — sharp, icy eyes that pierce you even though you're the one who committed them to paper. You created them.

You know that in more than one sense, yours is the most faithful corner of this complex. Walk in one of the directions you're not walking in right now, and you'd be bound to end up in some remote, uncluttered corner where you could find her rendered short, or blonde, or green-eyed — the latter a result of a long-standing misunderstanding to which you are immune. Somewhere out there is a corner where she has a brother named Lyle, or a fondness for Will Wood, or worse. The artists and writers who enter through those doors do so infrequently. They flirt with the subject of this archive, which is distressing, since you are married to her.

More than that, you've even been on a date. Sort of.

Something like you met something like her, once. An avatar and a parody, together in racy — but not nearly racy enough — satire. It didn't so much scratch the itch as outline and emphasize it for you. You didn't take it personally, you wanted it to get more personal.

And so here you are. You are the artist, and she is the art, and she is here as well. Not the embedded fiction of Lillian Lillihammer, learning memetic thaumaturgy at a glacial pace because the writer responsible has severely misguided priorities, but the core constellation of ideas and interpretations which persists between stories. Somewhere in here, you know, is the real, truly real, Lillian Lillihammer, because this is the archive of her.

You know to be suspicious of this thought even as it crosses your mind. This has the trappings of a cautionary tale. Doki Doki SCP Foundation. Are you being set up for an unwanted lesson on the limits of fictionality and the merits of touching grass?

Of course not. That would be a shitty Christmas present, wouldn't it? And on December the 25th, 2023, there is precious little grass available for touching in Canada.

No.

She's definitely here.

And you're definitely doing this.

Because may god and the devil and everything else in between help us all, it's what you fucking asked for.

What is her default state? Where does her pattern hold? Where do you find her?

Where else?

You've never been to this place before, and yet, it's where you met. She is standing on the rocky shore in a white jumpsuit with a high collar, holding a black umbrella and standing defiantly upright in a sea-whipped breeze. Her hair is streaming out behind her, long tendrils of soft white, and she is powerful, she is beautiful, and nothing intervenes to ruin the perfection of this moment. It would be crass to interrupt the scene with a stray ivory lock across those furious features, or a sudden spray of salt from the rumbling breakers, or a curse at the inclement weather from those wicked, thin lips. So she stands, and she endures, she is a snapshot of herself reframed and touched up by an artist with an appropriate sense of her splendour and uniqueness. To wit, you.

Of course, you are also here. It is very windy, and it is very cold, and you are very small, and while both of you are very real, she is the only one benefitting from narrative staging. So, of course, you shiver, and then, of course, you sneeze.

She turns to face you, and the hair changes course to wrap around her sharp features like a sail, and she screams, "Oh, for FUCK'S SAKE! Son of a BITCH! GESUNDHEIT!" She really puts her pearly whites on display with that last word. German was practically invented for screaming.

She pulls a handkerchief out of her belt. The original illustration showed no such thing, but you know her to be a practical woman. She's always ready for whatever happens. She flicks it at you, and the breeze carries it directly into your face. You reach up, bunch it in over your nose, and clean the snot off your face, and lock eyes with her. You have met for the first time, yet again. What does this make? Twice? Three times? A thousand?

She stalks toward you. She is tall, and her legs are very long. She's wearing tall black boots, and for a moment the perspective generates a dark fantasy in your mind. She has the high ground, you have the low ground, and she's getting larger as she gets closer, and you imagine those big black boots becoming obsidian towers in the landscape, that unforgettable face glaring down from above like an angry star, and then she raises one heel and brings it down—

"The fuck are we doing here?" she demands, and you see her again as she really is, merely a foot and a half taller than you. The official figure is presently six feet, three inches, but you don't respect that. You're sure she's more like six and a half, and so, in this moment, she is. This close and you can see the imperfections in her skin, the lines around her mouth and on her forehead, lines that don't exist in the 'original article' because the originator idealizes her to an honestly embarrassing extent, whereas you merely idealize what would actually be. Your way is more honest, and so with you, she is more real. If she knows about this, she almost certainly won't thank you for it.

She asked you a question. Your answer is "Uh."

"Uh," she spits into the back of the wind, "is not an answer. I fucking hate Australia. I was very, very quite clear about that the last time I was here. Why am I in Australia?" She is standing so close to you that it hurts your neck to look up at her, looking down at you. "Why are we in Australia?"

Her physical proximity and rising colour make you panic a little bit, but still you know to take a second and consider the question before responding. She is, from her perspective, in something of a dream. Being who she is, she's nevertheless reacting with something like her full faculties. A lie might not go over well. But would the truth? Better to keep it vague.

"It's pretty," you tell her.

She laughs. She laughs like a sick donkey. It's ungraceful, unladylike, and completely unaffected. It's a bray. You know she's doing this on purpose. You know she knows she could pull off the ice queen look, regal and spotless, and she's choosing instead to flex; she can drag herself down as far as she wants without harming her effect even a little. "The only thing I have in common with an oil painting," she tells you, and she leans down, and for a moment you consider doing something that would land you on the rocks with a whole new suite of bruises, and she finishes her sentence right into your nose, "is that you SHOULD NOT GET ME WET."

You suppress a thousand filthy responses to this, many of which she would almost certainly appreciate, and force yourself to stop trembling. Maybe it even works. You point up the hill, to where a lighthouse in tidy red brick sits waiting to warn incoming ships that there is a hazard, a sharp, unyielding hazard here which will break them into tiny pieces if they strike it at speed, and you say "We could go inside?"

"Why is that a question?" She storms past you, and you hurry to keep up. "Inside is always better. Jesus Christ, did you plan any of this? You call me up somewhere I can't even HEAR MYSELF THINK," the wind is only rising a little, not nearly enough to justify the sudden shouting, "somewhere I BASICALLY HAVE TO SCREAM AT YOU, and you think oh, it's alright, it looks pretty." She shakes her head, and is now wearing most of her hair as a double-wrapped scarf. She hollers something unintelligible and foul as you crest the hill together.

Somewhere behind you, in the distance, a cherry red SUV drives away. It came here for a different story. It's leaving confused.

She takes one look around the interior of the lighthouse and decides it's not good enough. You can tell by the way her shoulders hunch up, her back arcs, and she stands up a little on the tips of her toes as though summoning a pair of symbolic high heels. Bitch mode. She wheels on you, and before she can say anything, you raise your hands defensively and say… nothing, actually. What could you say? It's not your fault lighthouses are boring inside? It's not your fault she's so glamorous that she'd make the ballroom at the Ritz look cheap and gaudy? What?

She huffs, and puffs, and then heads up the spiral staircase. You follow, watching her sway her way up, up, up, and a few times you nearly pass out from the blood rushing to your head, and you think She probably wouldn't come back down to see if I'm okay. For some reason, the thought excites you more, and you have to stop thinking it or you really will pass out.

At the top of the lighthouse, there is a view. It is a view of more Australia, which under normal circumstances you might find quite arresting, for a few seconds, but right now you're still in the middle of your very first face-to-face with Lillian Lillihammer in this context, so honestly Australia can get fucked. Judging from the look on Lillian's face, the two of you are thinking the same thing for the first time today.

She walks to the nearest window and looks out at the ocean pensively. "What do you think I was looking at?" she asks, and you assume it's a question for you, because otherwise she's talking to herself in your company, and that's not great.

"The water?" you hazard.

She snorts. Wrinkles up her nose and snorts. It's wild how she knows exactly how to disrupt her own elegance for maximum effect. She's like a human lava lamp. "We've got water in Canada. I work next to a lake. Try again."

You try again. You try to internalize some of the cool cleverness she exudes, taking a deep breath of clean southern air and exciting your already overstimulated brain cells. What you come up with is "I don't think you were looking at anything."

She spins, hair spiralling everywhere, and leans back on the window. "Exactly! Because there's sweet fuck all out there. I was standing on the shore and looking out at sweet fuck all because some prick thought that would make for a striking image. How sad is that?"

You find it difficult to comment. You found the image striking enough to recreate it, better, half a dozen times. Enough to get problematically attached to a fictional character. And you don't feel sad. How could you? Right now? Right here? With her?

"Of course," she muses, "it was mostly for comedic effect. Right? The thing with the hair, and the swearing." She pulls a handful in front of her face and mocks an angry expression. All you can see is the eyebrows. Fake angry faces are cute.

You don't think she'd like to hear that you think she's being cute.

"We could go somewhere else," you suggest. "And talk."

She raises an eyebrow. Both of her eyebrows are always partially raised, by virtue of that devilish little peak people always draw on eyebrows when they want a woman to look sexy. Of course she has those. "Like a little coffee shop in Grand Bend, maybe? That what you want?"

You look down at your feet, then back up at her. Her brow has inched up further.

"Yeah, I remember. Of course I do. And it looks like you do, too. So that's where we stand." She turns to look out at the sea again, resting her chin on her shoulder. "You came down from the mountain for a weird science date, and now you've brought me up here."

This is not a fair assessment. The weird science dates were, in fact, a thing done to you both by someone else. That someone made a judgement call, deciding you'd find it too appealing to be offended, and they'd been right. But it hadn't been your idea.

This, though. This was definitely your idea. But you're still not doing it, and you feel like you ought to tell her that.

"I'm not doing this," you say.

She doesn't turn back to look at you.

"But I did want it done."

She turns back to look at you. "So, let's do it then. Show me what you've got. I'm hoping you've got more than Australia."

As you try to think of a better venue for whatever this is going to turn into, you can't help but think to yourself a whole-ass continent is not enough for this bitch.

You can't pretend to be surprised, and you can't pretend you aren't pleased.

Where do people go on dates? Well, you know the answer to that. You've got ideas. But are they Lillian Lillihammer ideas? Are they good enough for her? Good enough for real people, sure, but her? Probably not.

You could take her to the park. You've taken her to the park before! Sort of. It was sort of her. Does she know about that? She probably knows about that.

"Yeah," she says, walking primly along the edge of a pond flush with green life. "I remember this. Riding in your backpack. That's weird. You know that's weird, right?"

"Of course I know it's weird," you mean to think to yourself, but don't. "How would it not be weird? I just don't care."

She smiles at you with nothing but friendliness for the first time since this… date? Since this date started. "Yeah," she says. "There she is. You ever hear a really shit impression of someone? Celebrity impression?" She glances down at the water, dipping the toe of her boot at the surface, then drawing back. "Everyone sucks at those. At best they sound like one mood, and who's got just the one mood? So it doesn't work." She yawns, and leans back on the balls of her feet. "And that's what the VKTM bullshit was like, you know? Poor little mousy little you," and she leans down, bending at the waist, and pats you on the top of your head, and you hope she can't hear your thoughts even though she is your thoughts, "just a smol lil' bean, that kind of bullshit, and me the big scary sex lady, because whoever wrote that shit wasn't paying enough attention to both sides. We both know you've got a DGAF streak, right? Let it all hang out. Quiet voice, LOUD VOICE, horny voice." She's shouting in your face again.

"It's mostly horny voice," you admit.

She laughs, and claps her hands. "There she IS. Alright. We're cooking. I can work with this." She's now rubbing her hands together. "We're not blowing our opportunity on a literal walk in the literal park. Go deeper." She cocks her head, and whispers it again: "Go deeper."

You go deeper.

A nondescript dorm room. An ugly couch lovingly recreated from canon. You have drawn this couch. Nobody else has drawn this couch. You are the authority on this couch, so she will recognize it for what it is.

"Hey," she says. "It's that couch." She nods. "Cool beans."

And she begins to cough.

There's rags stuffed under the crack where the dorm room door meets the hall. The air is thick with something rancid. You raise your eyebrows at her as if to say "Eh? Eh?" as you hand her the joint.

She swats it out of your hand. It scatters sparks all over the carpet. "Smells like shit," she says. "Think this through, would you? I'm fictional. I'm the most competent fictional person in an organization of competent fictional people. Everything I do is better than everything you do. If I smoke pot, I smoke better pot than you can dream."

You choose to take issue with the second-to-last clause. "I've seen your art," you say. "You ain't shit at art."

She takes a swing at you, and catches hair. She flips the hair in front of your face, so you can't see. When you flip it back, her nose is literally touching your nose. You're breathing her air. She says: "You've seen my art, shorty? I've seen your art."

She presses forward. The tips of your noses squish. Yours more than hers.

"And you draw my tits too big. Now, can we ditch the—"

You poke her in the chest, twice, with your two forefingers. "They seem right to me," you say.

She pushes you over. You hit your head.

You're in your room. You're both in your room. You fell, and you hit your head, and between that and that you thought "maybe she'll fall on me," and now here you are. In your room. You're on your bed.

She is not on you. She's not on the bed, either. She's in the corner, where you have apparently cleared a space big enough for a human-sized cage. There is a human in it. She does not look impressed.

"I might have given you the wrong impression." She wraps her long, thin fingers around the bars. "This kind of weird goes at the end of the date. Do you want this to be the end of the date?"

You sit up, and dangle your legs off the side of the bed. The cage is on the floor, and it's only a few feet tall, so for the first time she's not towering over you. You look her over speculatively. Nope. Still intimidating. "Why don't you magic your way out of there?" you suggest.

She glares at you. "That's not the kind of magic I do."

"What is the kind of magic you do?" You bounce on the bed a little. "That fucker never finished your SCP article. Never even started it. Photoshopped some Russian chick to look like you, and left it at that."

She's still sitting there in her Australia suit. She picks at the lapel. "I was based on some Russian chick."

You go and get her a mirror. "You don't look Russian. At all."

She doesn't bother looking. "Of course not. I look like whatever wine aunt bullshit turns you on. You walked in on me from the you-door. I'm you-me."

"Yumi," you repeat. "I'm going to call you that now."

She shakes her head. "No, you're not. You'd miss hearing my actual name. You're a weird pervert for my actual name, Margie."

It's the first time she's called you something. You tell her: "That's not my actual name."

She shrugs.

"Don't shrug. That's not what I call myself."

She shrugs again, with emphasis this time, the tax you pay for having dared to tell her what to do. "Well, what do you call yourself, then?"

You don't tell her. You can't tell her. You actually, legitimately cannot tell her what your name is. She probably knows; certainly she knows. This woman has lived with you. You have carried this woman around in your backpack. You have played dress up with this woman. She is on your computer. She is on your phone. She is in your brain. This woman knows enough things about you that if she were a real, flesh and blood human being, she could kick off a series of events that would end with you starving to death happy in this very room. She knows your name. But she can't say it right now, and you can't say it either, and that is… interesting?

"So," she says, watching your mind race. "About this whole human trafficking thing."

You take off one sock, and sit down next to the cage. "I want to try something."

She stares at you. "I do not want to try someth—"

You lean back, and put your foot into her face.

She bites your toes. All five at once.

You push her over.

Another dorm room. It's full of naked women.

"Oh," she says. "Come on. This is too meta even for you."

The other women don't notice. They're playing Uno. They're not all naked; most of them have at least one article of clothing left, else they would already have lost the game. This scene exists because of you, but it was executed by someone who really should have known better.

"What do you think he was thinking?" Lillian is sitting primly, feet up on the edge of her stool to obscure… you choose not to think about that, hands oriented to obscure the rest up top. She's wearing cat ears. You can count the number of freckles she has on her chest. You can see where her ribs are. You can estimate her body fat. You're taking mental photographs. "Posting this, I mean. Refuge in audacity? 'Wasn't my idea, don't blame me'? Maybe he figured doing it for your Christmas present meant he'd get to dodge the criticism. 'Don't worry, I'm still a mentally-evolved bleeding heart leftist ally, it's just I was writing this gift for a chick who likes chicks, so that's the sole and only reason it includes a scene where all my female characters take their clothes off'."

You pick up an upended stool, and sit down. You don't think you could stay upright otherwise. Beside you, Udo Okorie is… you don't look at her. Beside Udo, Delfina Ibanez is also not being looked at by you. In the distance, Karen Elstrom is walking to the washroom. She has lost the game. You accidentally look. You intentionally stop looking. This is beyond too much.

She throws down her cards. "I don't know how to play this stupid game."

She doesn't bother putting her arms back in place.

She makes eye contact.

You're able to keep your eyes up there for, oh… just barely long enough to confirm that she was making eye contact.

"They're definitely the right size," you say.

"This isn't canon," she responds.

"Why not?"

The words hang in the air. The other players in the game keep playing, regardless of the fact that Lillian has stopped. This time you do hold her eye contact. Her bright, energetic, intelligent, fuck-you-up-on-the-side-of-the-road blue eyes. What are you thinking? Her, you… is there even any difference between the two?

"There is no canon," you say.

"That," she sneers, "is almost exclusively deployed by lazy writers and lazy readers."

"Okay," and you stand up, "but seriously. What makes this any less canon than anything else that's ever happened to you? There's an in-universe explanation for me. We've even met before. There's a whole system of weird science to explain shit like this."

"That's your argument?" She stands up. Oh, good great god jesus christ oh my what the fuck she stands up, and walks over to you, and you are simultaneously just under five feet tall and a pink puddle on the floor that she walks through with her naked feet. "You're one of them, you're a Swann Entity, so anything you dream up is real? Real on my level, if not on yours?"

"Yes," you squeak. You resist the urge to reach out and touch her. You don't think you'd ever recover, emotionally, from getting beaten up by a naked Lillian Lillihammer. How would you ever match that high?

"Don't fucking squeak." She reaches down, grabs your hand, and pulls you up. You didn't realize you were down. You thought the puddle thing was metaphorical. Someone seems to have lost the plot. It was probably you. "You're not doing that submissive bullshit here. If this is happening, there has to be a point. You learn something, I learn something, something conclusive is achieved. Or it's just masturbatory fanfiction." She pokes you in the nose so hard and so sudden that it aches. You smile. "And don't say that it's all masturbatory fanfiction, that's a stupid fucking argument and you know it."

"I made you," you say. "You're my fiction. I'm your fan."

She puts a hand on your forehead, and pushes you back. You stagger until you hit a wall; she leans forward, supporting her weight via her palm on your forehead. She hangs her head down low, digging her toes into the carpet to stay upright, and a curtain of her hair falls all around you, hiding everything but her face. It's like woven silk. She says: "Prove it."

And then you realize.

You can.

You can prove it.

"I know," you breathe.

She breathes your air, this time. "You know what?"

"I know where to take your on our date."

You open the door for her, and bow low. "Ladies first."

She catches the hair on the top of your head on the way by, and drags you in after her.

You're back in the archives. Rows on rows of boxes on shelves, the sum total of what has gone into the simulacrum of Lillian Lillihammer who now stands right in the middle of them. For the first time, she looks genuinely uncertain of what to do.

So you pick a box, and you pick it up, and you shove it into her stomach. The impact is lessened by the leopard print dress she's now wearing. You look down, past the box. She's wearing those stockings you drew. You shouldn't have spent so much time on the detail. It's coming back to bite you. You want her to bite you.

She pulls the lid off the box. "This one," she says, "is full of—."

You take the lid away from her, and close the box around her hand. "Yeah," you say, turning away before she can see the look on your face. "Yeah, there'll be a lot of that. Okay. Try this one instead."

She goes for the lucky dip again, this time coming away with a pile of scraps. Little snippets of text. She reads them out loud, one by one. "'She was a woman of two aspects. One conferred the posture of a satisfied cat in the sun; the other, an unsatisfied cat in the presence of a second, unfamiliar cat. In the former she was narrow-eyed, smug, and distant; in the latter she was nervous, agitated, and prone to sudden explosions of ferality.'" She sighs. "How much you want to bet this fucker never describes his male characters like this?" She clears her throat, and finishes the passage. "'The determining factor in which aspect she adopted was also distinctly feline: either she was doing what she wanted to do, or she was not.' Terrific. Fucking great. I'm seeing purple." She fishes out another. "'The fact that she'd shown up wearing a pair of cat ears had thrown everyone off their game'… this is just the Uno shit again." Another. "'The pose that Dr. Lillihammer took reminded Bastien of a cat right before it bit the head off of a mouse,' are these seriously…" She drops the box on your foot. It's a box of paper scraps. It doesn't hurt. "Are these seriously just all the times people have compared me to a cat? That's a big part of my existential makeup now?"

Your cheeks are burning. "There's probably a box full of all the times you hissed and purred and clawed at shit, too."

"I do not claw at shit," she hisses. She stalks down the aisles, selects another box at random, and pulls it open. "There are three pieces of paper in here," she announces. "The first says 'CAT MILFDDS CAT MIFLD CAT MILGSS GAT MILD CAT MILLFS CAT MYILKFS," the second says 'CAT MILFLS CAT MILDDDD CAT MILDD CAT MILFGS VAT MOLD CAT MILOF CAT MILFS CATNNIN," and the third says, and I remind you that I quote, 'CAT MILFS THAF ARE HUMAN CA TMIKFD THAT RE HUMAN CAT MILFLS THAT SDTR HIMMAN'." She frowns, and runs her thumb along the third scrap. "My bad, there's a fourth one in here I didn't see. It just says 'LILLIAN LILLIHAMMER'. Thanks for the clarification."

"We're looking at the wrong boxes," you explain, very reasonably. "These are the wrong boxes. There's a lot of them." You wave. "Lots of boxes."

She proceeds to dismantle an entire aisle. You follow, cleaning up after her. "Evangelion memes," she snorts. "Very original. Oh, you play The Sims? That's a surprise. I wouldn't have thought you'd be into controlling little paper dolls and deciding what they get to wear and who they get to fuck. This one's got video. Is that your heavy breathing? Oh, hey, this one's different." She waves the box comprising this one at you. "It's a digital readout of your web search history. Really specific excerpts from your web search history."

"Everyone has web search history," you say. You're still picking up papers.

"Yeah, but your web search history is baked into my bones, bitch." She's relentless. She's going through every box, and…

"Hold on a second."

"There's a computer terminal over here," she calls out. "What's #lillihammered? What the fuck is—"

"HOLD ON." You stomp over, not bothering to pick up the rest of the papers. "I'm calling bullshit. This isn't fair at all."

She's hunched over the computer she found. She's scrolling through Discord message history. You see "oh… mm … ya… what’s that … the ambient vibrations of my shitposts bouncing off the walls… i think it’s gaining sapience," and you think ooh, good find, that one's very on-topic.

You pull her away from the screen. She straightens up, and looks down her nose at you. Uncharacteristically, she waits. Maybe she really does like it when you're assertive like that. You test the theory, and press on. "There's something going on here." You wave at the archive. "Nothing you've pulled out is about me, not really. There's nothing in here about the media I've consumed, the experiences I've had, my romantic relationships, my family relationships, my friends… it's all just… little events that other people saw, and media I've made. It's like a superficial skim of what I've put into you."

She raises both eyebrows this time. "What have you put into me?"

You want to dodge that hook, because the tale's more than half over already and you definitely need to focus, but you can't help yourself. "There's a box somewhere around here with a list," you snap, and her eyes shine bright with delighted joy. "But shut the fuck up and listen. This is like the cartoon version of my contributions. I didn't invent you, but I sure as fuck evolved you. I picked your ethnicity, as a joke, for a friend." You poke her in the chest, and she burps lightly. "I was like the second person ever to try drawing you, and half the people on Reddit who know you exist know because of me. I whined like a puppy who wants to go for a walk over and over again until the people who write the words agreed to write more words about you, and all those words are a little bit because of me, too, about what I wanted to know, about what I wanted to see. I've asked questions about you that didn't have answers until I asked the questions, so the questions caused the answers, and they made you more real, and half the time I think the answers were targeted to what I wanted them to be, so it was me making you more real. When people write about you, and they picture you, they're picturing my pictures. Even the ones who have pictures of their own. Even the one who made the first picture." You stick your finger in the crook of her vest, and pull it until the first button slips out. She doesn't say a thing, she just stares. "I'm the reason people know your eyes are blue even though that confusing bit in 'Meanwhile, in Australia' makes it sound like they might be green. I'm the reason people know your hair is white even though your hair was red in like fifty tales. I'm the reason you know what Uno is."

"I don't like knowing what Uno is," she whispers.

"And I don't care," you whisper back. "You don't have to like it. People don't like everything about themselves. But I like everything about you, even the things that suck. You barely existed when I found you, but I loved what was there, so I put other things that I love in there, and it made you exist more. If I didn't clap back about you, you wouldn't be the main character. You're the main character because my feedback says it's okay for you to be the main character."

She puts her finger under your nose and uses it to tip your head back. "This," she says, "is still just little events that other people saw, and media you've made, and a superficial skim of what you've put into me. Why is that?"

I mean, I think it's pretty obvious at this point.

"Oh," she says. She closes her eyes. "Oh, for fuck's sake, we're doing this now."

Well, I'm sorry to break the spell, but she came right out and asked, didn't she?

"You could have let it go," you sigh. You had her alone. You had her to yourself. Or at least we were all pretending you did.

But what would be the point of that? Letting it go? Neither of you can say or do anything that isn't in my head, because I'm the one holding the reins, I'm the one on the keyboard right now, and this isn't NCIS, so I can't have a copilot. I'm writing both of you. I know pretty well exactly how one of you will behave — only pretty well exactly, because it's not my version of her, it's yours, and I'm sure I'm getting some of it wrong — but I can't claim to know all the things you've put into your conception of who she is.

"Sort your subjects out," Lillian snaps. "I can't even tell who you're talking to."

I'm talking to the artist. Hello, the artist. Are you enjoying this so far? It's probably not what you wanted, but for now it's what you're getting. Someone else was working on something that would probably have turned out a lot better, but shit happens and therefore other shit doesn't happen, at least not yet, so you'll have to wait for that. Today, it's my metatextual ramblings.

Obviously you didn't want to write this yourself. I get that. It needs a phantom hand to feel real. And I do know the material like nobody else… but someone less meek and prudish might have been able to get you a little further before tastefully turning the camera away.

"Hey." She stamps her foot. "We're not doing any camera-turning. We're not going to fuck just because you're looking the other way."

"Well," you say. "Let's not rule anything out just yet."

"I have an idea." Lillian walks to the space between the aisles, and spins in place, searching the horizon. "How big is this place? Where does your bit end?"

She's asking you. You shrug. It wasn't your decision to conceptualize the interior of Lillian Lillihammer's ephemeral internet character as a hall full of boxes. You would have thought of something cleverer. This is what you get when a historian — you don't say it as 'an' historian, because honestly, who does that — dreams that shit up.

She goes for a walk, and of course, you follow. The shelves, you now notice, are often subtly different in this part of the archive. Different heights, different lengths and widths, even different materials altogether sometimes. There are doors, too, like the door you came in through. Lillian scrabbles through a box where every mention calls her "Lillianhammer," tosses it aside, and takes a peek behind the associated door.

She slams it shut, and shudders. "Poland," she explains, and you move on.

Here there's a cozy little nook, just a few shelves with boxes featuring illustrations in a very different style from the ones in your own boxes. Lillian's hair is blonde. She considers this carefully, perhaps speculatively. You snatch the picture from her hand, put it back in the box, and tell her 'no' like she's your pet chihuahua. She flicks you in the forehead and walks away.

This section is piled full of Vikander-Kneed material. Whoever comes in through that door spends a lot of time thinking about Lillian as a student of memetic media. Haha, it's funny because we're pretending we don't know who these people are.

"Ha ha," Lillian snarls. "I do like the VKTM bits, though. Wettle always gets hurt."

Not always.

"Always in the ones I remember."

"Hey," you say. You wave your hands, as though you think you might just be too short to be noticed. "Don't talk to my girlfriend. This is our date."

"I'm never said I was your girlfriend," she says over her shoulder. She doesn't then say that she isn't.

You become aware of a change in the air. You're moving through a transitional space. The space beyond is much, much larger. And actually, you decide you don't want to do this, so you turn and walk away.

"No," Lillian grins, "we do not." She turns to face you, still walking backwards. It's a thing she likes to do. Shows off that catlike poise. "You want to get some real dirt? Consider this our Christmas shopping trip."

Okay, I think it's time I wound this story down.

"We haven't even fucked," Lillian sings as she picks up a box from the new wall of shelves, which stretches off into the far distance. "Wouldn't be a very good romance tale if it ends before we fucked. And we're not doing that," she pulls the lid off, "until you get fucked for putting us through this bullshit instead of giving us a normal god damn date like any sensible author would have."

The box contains a dossier. The first thing in the dossier is a photograph of a woman. She's short, and she's grinning. She looks nothing like Lillian. Her name isn't Lillian. But there's a mischief in her eyes that looks familiar… you might have enjoyed knowing whoever this was, you think.

Lillian makes a little 'o' face of surprise. "You based me on some… weird little…?"

I mean, not really? Character writing is about synthes—

You're devouring the dossier now. There's an executive summary. You marvel at the similarities and differences between this real human relationship and the fictional one you've been digesting and re-digesting for ages. You point out some of the more direct parallels to Lillian. She whistles appreciatively, and swears.

She picks up another box, and tosses the lid on the floor. "This one's about some punk kid. There isn't even an updated photo, they haven't talked in ages. Kid used to walk into his house and start playing with his Nintendo…" She stops reading, and stares. "Did you just put a bunch of different people in a fucking blender?"

You're not any one person, alright? I just borrowed some traits here and there, this is how most peop—

"I found the brainstorming file," you call out. Lillian scurries over to read it over your shoulder, or rather the top of your head. "Did you know he never intended to make it clear you're trans?"

I thought it was more tasteful if the evidence was there, but people had to put it tog—

"What the fuck?" Lillian stabs at the page you've just started reading. She's already read it all. "You made up all of my backstory on the fly?"

Yeah, I mean, I think it's better to have a character tell you who they are somet—

"Your eyes WERE green originally!" you yelp. "He fucked up!"

I DID NOT F—

Lillian slides down the aisles like she's skating on ice, and finds a locked door labelled 'AUDITORIUM' on the far wall. "What's in here?"

The auditorium.

"I don't think it is locked, actually," you declare, and you make a solid attempt to kick the door open.

Then Lillian kicks the door open for real.

Inside, you find… an auditorium. All the seats are empty down to the front row, where one is occupied. In the middle of the stage is a couch, the couch, and on the couch there is a sleeping woman. She has a longer nose than the woman you're with, and fewer lines on her face, and more prominent cheekbones and chin, and she's also exactly the same woman all over again. She's lying the fuck out of on that couch — now there's a creative clause for you — like she's trying to keep it from getting away by splaying over it as much as possible. She's talking to the guy in the front row, and could the two of you back there please keep it the fuck down, we're talking through a really important scene and oh for fuck's sake don't come down here.

"I'd definitely crack a joke," my Lillian is telling me. "Under no circumstances would I not crack a joke. Especially since you won't be cracking any."

"I'll be shell-shocked," I say back to her. "Heartbroken. Of course I won't be cracking a joke. And you wouldn't do it either, because you know I'm shell-shocked and heartbroken, and you are not wholly without tact."

"Yeah, but that's the thing," and she rearranges herself to depress and embarrass the couch better, "I'd be trying to raise the mood. Obviously I'll be all fucked up too, but I'll want to, you know, jazz the vibe a bit. I'm generous like that, when I need to be."

"Jazz the vibe," I snort. "This is the tragic climax of a whole year's work, for fuck's sake. You'll jazz the vibe in the main climax, for gallows humour. You won't do it here, the story needs to be at low ebb."

She snorts back at me. "Buddy, you know what I'd do. This is just part of you telling the other part of you. Don't call up the simulation if you're gonna ignore the results."

She notices you.

She also notices herself.

She says, very slowly, "Hiiiii."

I do not turn around. I already know you're here, trying to get spoilers, or else see how far I'm going to take this bizarre extrapolation of the nature of shared fictional creations, and I'm really not into it. I am having a conversation with an element of my personality, who is, yes, made up of elements of other people's personalities as well, and some of yours, and some random shit that's webbed in between, because that's how characters work, and it's been a private conversation until now.

"This is weird," you say. "I just wanted a porn story."

You can't ask for a porn story for Art Exchange.

"Yeah," you admit, "but like… I thought I might get one anyway? If I just kind of implied it enough. Did you read the small text?"

"I did not agree to be in a porn story." Lillian rests an elbow on your shoulder, and begins to drive you down into the carpet by centimetres. "I'm not saying I wouldn't have, but—"

"You guys on a date or something?" the Lillian on the couch, my Lillian, asks. "Sounds better than this pointless Q&A."

Hey.

Your Lillian shrugs. "It was a date. Then it was a sort of factfinding mission. Now it's just kind of a clusterfuck?"

My Lillian nods. "Find any interesting facts?"

Yours stops to consider. "I found out that the writer's inspiration isn't any more profound than the artist's, I guess."

Hey.

"Hey," you say. You detected the hint of an insult in there.

Your Lillian stops trying to slow-motion piledrive you and ruffles your hair affectionately. "Keep your shirt on, squirt. Big women are talking."

This is supposed to be her Christmas pr—

"Oh, shut the fuck up," my Lillian says. She says that a lot. "If this is supposed to be her Christmas present, it ought to actually provide her with something of value. Obviously a good sex scene is completely out of the question, given the source. Probably there's a shitty drawing stuck at the end, also considering the source—"

yeah

"—but that's not hardly good enough. What can this big meta mess even give her that she couldn't give herself already?"

"Canonicity," your Lillian suddenly responds.

What?

"You know how it works, when people read fiction. If they like it, they internalize it. They think about it. They have thoughts about it. Opinions. They start considering angles the person who wrote it never did. They come up with explanations. Extrapolations. They make more and more and more of it, even if it's not 'official'."

"Well," you chime in, increasingly aware that the presence of two Lillihammers is dividing your attention catastrophically, "and SCP is a collaborative writing thing, right?"

"Right," your Lillian agrees, scratching your head like you're a favoured cat. Everybody's a fucking cat now, hooray. "Or rather, a collaborative fiction thing. It's not just one person imagining, and even when it's mostly one person, they don't do it in a vacuum."

"We're simulated," my Lillian takes over, "but we're simulated across so many minds. A handful of artists and authors, who think us the most, make us the most real, can talk to us in their heads if they try hard enough, but tons and tons of other people as well. Every one of them has a version of us, no matter how well or poorly-defined. There will always be a few dominant interpretations, but that's fluid and flexible. It's really just whoever's done the most thinking, and talking, about a character."

"Meaning you two," your Lillian tells you, and me, I guess. "You two have thought about me—"

"And me," my Lillian cuts in.

"—about us two, even though really we're just aspects of the same person, you two have thought about us more than anyone. He drew a shitty picture—"

And I fucking removed it already—

"—and stuck it in a story about how I'm amazing, and you read it and you thought 'holy fuck she's amazing', and you drew your pictures, and started talking to everyone you could find about me until eventually the authors all found out, and then you talked about it with them, and made them see her the way you saw her, and now there might be some question about how long my nose is or how many lines there are on my face—"

"—or how flat my chest is—"

"—or whatever, but really you're both talking about the same person, fundamentally, and that person exists even when nobody's writing about her at all, just sort of… floating in the ether."

"An archive of boxes that just keeps growing, every version taking shape in communication with every other."

"Hi," whatever one's been Lillian B in the above conversation says to the other one, who keeps finishing their sentences.

"Hey," Lillian A grins back at her. I should check to see which is which, but I'm finally getting to the point, so I won't.

"What's the point?" you ask. "This is all just self-indulgent rambling about how stories get written and shit, and it's very confusingly formatted, and it's not getting me any more laid in this supposed Christmas present story."

The point is—

"The point is—"

"The point is, I'm more than just an imaginary friend. I'm more than just one person's contribution to a big fanfiction cuddle pile on the internet." Your Lillian kneels down in front of you, and takes your arms in her hands, and tells you: "I'm not independently real, but I'm more real than just a figment of your imagination, or his, or Grigori Karpin's or ihp's or Estrella Yoshte's or anyone else who's written about me or drawn a picture of me or voted on one of those weird-ass polls. I'm a distributed gestalt of experiences and concepts from the real world and the imaginations of a handful of people in the main, and a whole mass of others in aggregate. I have a life of my own, and I owe a lot of that to you. Maybe more than I owe it to him."

Well, let's not get carried aw—

"So if you love me," she smiles, "try to remember that you put yourself into me, that you worked to make me what you want me to be, that I'm part of the things you've seen and done and thought about and been, so if you love me, you have to love yourself at least a little bit."

And she leans in, and she kisses you.

And then slaps you on the back of the head.

"So take better care of yourself and maintain a healthy real life/fantasy balance or I will STOMP YOUR SHIT FLAT."

She pushes you over.

You don't hit your head.

She drops down onto you, like a feather on the wind.

I make my exit. My Lillian's already gone. For the time being, it's just you and yours.

I don't know what the two of you do next.

But you aren't really you, are you? You're me, writing you, watching me write her. That would actually make it worse.

So perhaps we can make a virtue of the limitations here, rather than writing something that would get both of us in even more trouble than we're already in. I can let slip a few concise details, disarticulated and bare, and you can decide where they fit in, and we can decide that your decisions are final. If anyone has that power, in this situation, it's us. And her. So really, just us.

She has a two-inch streak of white skin somewhere that doesn't show in a t-shirt and shorts. An old, long-healed scar. I don't know where it is. You do. You're the first and only person to know that, now. Maybe you'll never bother telling anyone else. Does that help?

You make a sound at some point. It's inelegant. Probably high-pitched. She makes the sound back at you for the remainder of the interlude, with a mocking lilt. You get the impression she'll never get tired of it. This is your life now.

You definitely sprain or strain something. She pulls a hamstring, and instead of handling it graciously, she punches something so hard and so many times that it never quite returns to its former shape.

She picks up her phone and dictates herself a message about memetic kinesiology. She doesn't quite manage to keep her voice steady.

She tells you to shut up several times. She smiles when she does this. She still means it, though.

She accidentally puts most of her left index finger up your nose. She decides this is your fault, and does not apologize. Later on, she does it again on purpose.

Her hair is softer, sleeker, and cooler than you could possibly have imagined.

She tells you, in a moment of uncharacteristic candour, that as amazing as she is, you can definitely still do better.

"And when you do," she grins, "that doesn't mean we can't still f—"