“That bitch? Fuggeddaboudit. Almost bit my goddamn head off when 
| come home last night!” 


Behind him, for certain now. He spun on his heels to the window in 
his office. Opened just a crack, he was hearing it through the 
screen. And there on the sill outside sat two...mantises? 


“HAH! | hear that! Fuckin’ broads.” 


Mantis Religiosa, the European Mantis. He’d seen hundreds of 
them, dissected them, watched them eat one another during coitus, 
cut the heads off a few males himself just to watch them breed in 
captivity. And here they sat across from each other, hind legs 
crossed and covered in what looked like denim pants. One wore a 
baseball cap with a Yankees logo. The other a small bowler, with a 
cigar hanging from its mandibles. They cursed and laughed and 
joked and gestured to the scenery, sharing off-color remarks in 
exactly the manner that someone who had never been to New York 
might imagine city people to act. For Christ’s sake, one even had a 
tiny gold chain around its neck. 


Dr. Grant slammed the window shut, turned his back on them, and 
headed to the break room. Coffee. That’s what’s good for you, man. 
Clear your head a bit... 


Through the pane of glass he could just barely hear one say to the 
other “Jesus, what’s his problem?” 


The intercom first squawkled to life at 0800. “Would Researchers 
Melville, Sarkhar, and Joyce please report to maintenance as soon 
as possible. The sponges have become animate and are holding 
janitorial staff hostage. Repeat: researchers Melville, Sarkhar, and 
Joyce to maintenance.” 


Grant stopped in the middle of the hallway and quickly moved to the 
side just in case, watching and listening. Strangest thing...there 
wasn't any commotion. No lock down protocol, no station report 
instructions, no security personnel running down the hall. 


... and no breach alarm? 


Instead, there were just three faces he'd never seen before looking 
at Marshall oddly while he pressed himself against the wall. 
Gracefully as he could, Grant smiled, nodded, waved, and moved 
back toward entomology, making himself as small as he could. 


“And here’s the entomology Lab,” Dr. Churchwell said smiling as Dr. 
Grant took hold of the door and held it open for her. A bit old 
fashioned of him, but still a long way from creeper territory. “Not 
quite so well stocked as the one at Site-77 I’m sure, but we get by.” 


“’m sure it will be fine,” Marshall replied, looking around with hands 
planted firmly in his pockets. “Thank you for showing me around. | 
realize you're probably very busy.” 


“Hey! Knock that shit off! That’s my lunch!” They were back outside 
the window. 


“Make me, ya ugly mug!” Harder looking, these two. Bandannas 
sticking out of back pockets. 


“Motherfucker, I'll cut you!” 


Dr. Grant's eyes widened as he watched the two leather-jacket 
wearing mantises struggling over the carcass of a luna moth on the 
branch outside the window. He opened his mouth to say something, 
but the words caught in his throat. 


“Oh, it’s my pleasure!” Mary smiled broadly. “Not much happening 
today, anyway.” She reached behind her and closed the window, 
shivering a bit, apparently oblivious to the insectoid knife-fight 
quickly escalating in the tree behind her. 


Deep breaths. This isn’t happening. She’d be saying something if it 
was. Get your shit together, Grant! 


“Just curious; what brings you out to Sloth Spit?” (Marshall might 
have noticed that she used the British pronunciation “sloath” rather 
than the flatter American variant, but he was too busy trying to tear 
his eyes away from the assembling gang brawl beyond the window.) 
“We don’t get many former HMCL’s out this way and... | don’t mean 
to pry but—My god, are you alright? You look pale.” 


NolAmBloodyWellNotAlright! 


“I’m fine,” he said, padding some sweat from his brow with the back 
of his sleeve and taking a tentative sip of his third cup of coffee that 
morning. “It’s just...” 


It’s just that I’m seeing a veritable army of sapient mantises about to 
go all Jets vs. Sharks on one another over your shoulder. But other 
than that things are just peachy! 


“...| didn’t get very much sleep last night. Nerves, you know?” He 
chuckled in a half-hearted way and drank some more, wishing he 
had the irresponsible nature necessary to put a little whiskey in it. 
Mellow his ass out for a few hours. 


“| see...” she said, not quite believing him. There was a pregnant 
pause. The rumble outside began to die down and the crowd 
disperse, hollering profanities behind them. A few corpses lay about 
the leaves, bleeding and making pained gestures as tiny red and 
blue lights began to flash from a nearby branch. “...Well?” 


Grant snapped back to attention. “Hm?” 
“What brings you out to 87?” 


She knows. She knows you've lost it. Look at that pitying stare. God, 
is this what it feels like? Is this insanity? | don’t feel very crazy... 


“|... Doctor’s orders,” He finally managed. “Psychiatrist back at 
Site-77 said it would be good to clear my head, let someone else 
deal with 400 for a year or two. Containment is stable and...” Green 
insects in NYPD blue with tiny badges on their chests slapped 
handcuffs on the ruffians that could still move. A female with curly 
brown hair flowing down behind her compound eyes screamed at 


the police to leave her baby alone. Grant needed out. Needed out 
right now. “I’m sorry, can we keep going? I’ve got a meeting with 
Director Weiss at 12:30.” 


You idiot, it’s only 9:45. If she didn’t know before, she does now. 


“...Yeah,” Churchwell said. A confused look was painted on her 
brow. “Sure thing. I'll take you up to records.” But that wasn’t the 
whole sentence, Marshall could tell by the way her voice rose at the 
end. Mary Churchwell had just come as close as professionally 


possible to calling him a ‘weirdo’. “I'll tell you, as high strung as you 
are | think you'll like it here. Things are pretty hum-drum.” 


“YOU SON OF A BITCH I AIN'T DONE NOTHING! FUCK THE PO- 
LICE!” 


“| imagine they must be...” 


“Reminder;” the intercom squealed at lunch; “Pumpkin Spice 
flavored beverages are strictly prohibited in light of the recent 
containment of E-8820. For details, please see Site-87 general mail 
‘Re: Subcutaneous Ginger’, sent last Wednesday. Department 
heads, please forward to your teams.” 


Grant looked down at his coffee and was very nearly sick. No one 
else dumped their drinks. 


“Yo Vinnie, toss me one o'them beers?” It hadn’t stopped. 
“You got it!” It would never stop. 


Tiny piles of foam poured over the tops of their equally tiny cans. 
The hallucinations were getting more vivid, he was almost certain of 
it. For Pete’s sake, he could smell hops and barley wafting in 
through the screen. 


“So,” Director Weiss said, looking over her reading glasses at her 
new recruit. His face was gray. He was sweating. Looked like he 
had spent all day on some kind of Scooby Doo chase. So she asked 
a question she knew very well that this man would answer with a lie. 


“...How has your first day been, Dr. Grant?” 
“PAAAAAULIE! YOUR SISTER'S HOT!” 


“Frank! | can hear you ya know! | ain’t deaf!” She slapped him 
across the mandible with her long pincer claw. A gaggle of others in 
orange construction hats snickered and elbowed one another. 


Goddammit, shut up! You're not real! GO AWAY! 


“Good!” he said meekly. “Really good. Can't wait to... uh... can't wait 
to dive right in!” Grant could smell his own sweat steadily rising 
under his corduroy sport coat. He felt as though he’d been bleeding 
for hours; he was so exhausted. Palms wet. Mouth dry. Stomach 
doing flip-flops. Marshall was sure he’d have an ulcer by the end of 
his shift. Dear god, it wasn’t even one o’clock yet. 


| should just say it. She must have noticed by now. You can’t even 
control your furtive glances out the window. 


As if on cue, five of them fluttered by, carrying with them a boom box 
and a tiny square of corrugated cardboard. Some god-awful lyric 
from the days of Ice-T slithered into his consciousness on the back 
of the radio’s maddening beat... and then they started to break 
dance. Funny, for exoskeletal beings, they weren't doing a very bad 
job. 


Seven goddamn years working with a Type 3 cognitohazard and | 
get nicked my first day in Backwoods USA where nothing happens 
ever... It fucking figures. 


“HA. Marshall, don’t be so obvious. You look like hell!” the Director 
balked. “I have half a mind to order you back to your apartment for 
the afternoon, let you get some rest.” 


TellhertellhertellhertellherNO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T DO 
THAT YOU WILL END UP INA CELL GETTING PROBED AND 
DISSECTED FOR THE NEXT TEN YEARS; ARE YOU STONED? 


“I’m sure I'll be fine. Maybe I'll go get some... fresh air over lunch or 
something,” he managed. Twelve mantis men drinking from brown 
paper bags were whooping and hollering out the window behind her. 


investigation, security footage showed Agent opening 
SCP-733-01's containment locker and [REDACTED]. Further 
investigation showed that an unidentified senior Foundation 
researcher was missing from Site- , determined by checking the 
Site- roster for unfilled positions. 


When questioned, Agent refused to answer questions, merely 
stating, "He got what he deserved." Agent is currently detained 
at Site- , pending further investigation. 


« SCP-732 | SCP-733 | SCP-734 » 


She looked hard at her new recruit, focusing on a spot directly in the 
center of his forehead. The volume began to crescendo outside and 
Grant fought his damnedest to keep focused. 


“GO SHORTY! IT’S YA BIRFDAY! GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S YA 
BIRFDAY!” 


Was she staring him down? Trying to probe him? Digging the truth 
out of that tiny scrap of skull? He was suddenly conscious of the 
long silence passing between them when finally the Director rolled 
her eyes and slapped the desk so hard it made Marshall’s palms 
hurt. 


“ALL RIGHT! Enough is enough!” With one hard push and a spin, 
her chair soared to the open window, and her bony, gnarled fist 
banged hard on the screen. “Will you please! BE. QUIET!” Every last 
mantis, all at once, dropped what they were doing, stopped their 
chortling and taunting and dancing and arguing and fixed her with a 
stare. “People are trying to work in here today you... hood/ums!” The 
window slammed shut and the Director rolled back to her desk, 
smoothing the wrinkles in her blouse and sputtering her anger out 
through loose lips. “Fat lot of good fresh air is going to do you 
today... Sorry about that. There’s only so much a woman can be 
expected to take.” 


Dr. Marshall Grant’s jaw fell so fast, he nearly chipped the linoleum 
tile. 


“Which reminds me!” Director Weiss continued, pulling open a 
drawer and removing a manila folder labeled for general Site-87 
access. “Here’s the record we have of this ‘Leafer Mantis’ 
phenomenon.” 


“The... The what?” 


“Oh, don’t be cute. These rotten bugs come from miles around and 
infest this facility like the plague every year and I’m sick of it. We 
don’t know what's causing it, but every late summer, something like 
ten thousand mantises start thinking they’re people and giving my 
research staff a headache.” 


“|...Uh... limagine they must.” Grant was trying to decide if he had 
finally pitched his wobbly. But better to play along for the moment. 
“Why... Why haven’t they been contained?” 


The Director frumped in his general direction. “What part of ‘ten 
thousand mantises’ did you miss? Besides, it’s little more than a 
nuisance, but numbers seem to be rising every year, and they are 
increasingly hard to ignore. See if you can get with Churchwell, 
capture a few fresh specimens, and figure out what we’re working 
with. Don’t have a lot of time on this; the phenomenon generally 
peters out around the thirtieth.” 


“Yes, ma’am,” Grant said, straining against a tide of relieved 
laughter. Of course. A Nexus. He felt dumber (and saner) already. 
“I'll see what we can work out after lunch. | think | will go take it in 
town, if you don’t mind. It really is just.. haha! It’s just beautiful 
outside!” 


“Suit yourself.” The Director said, waiving him off with her hand and 
returning to her paperwork. Never could figure the new ones for a 

minute. They always seemed so utterly fascinated on their first day. 
Ah well. Two weeks from now he'd be bored out of his skull like the 
rest of them. Let him have his fun. “Oh, Dr. Grant? One more thing.” 


“Yes ma’am?” he asked, practically glowing. 


Director Weiss tied her face in a bow, and gave Marshall a good 
looking over, up and down and back again. “...Lose that suit, would 
you? | appreciate the professionalism, but you keep coming in to 
work dressed like that, everyone’s going to think you're nuts.” 


|Hub| 


Time Crime in Greater Wisconsin - A Primer 


Alright, come on in, have a seat. Officers Wallach, Friedman, 
congratulations on graduating from the academy. Sergeant Bickell, 
I'm pleased you were able to transfer from Milwaukee. Usually we 
wouldn't see so many new faces, but we finally fixed a computer 
error that wouldn't let a bunch of our guys retire. Kept pushing the 
date forward a day. 


Still, it's good to have you three. Hopefully you'll make good time in 
the Sloth’s Pit PD. I’m not going to say its quiet, but violent crime is 
pretty low, and as for the rest... you'll get used to it. 


This is going to be kind of an informal seminar, and you'll be in 
several of these over the next couple of weeks. If we tried to put 
together slideshows and do all the paperwork, the staties would 
laugh us out of the building. Still, you’re probably going to run into 
this stuff at some point, so you might as well know. 


Today, I’m talking about time travel. Yeah, yuk it up. I'll wait. 
Yes, I’m serious. We ready? 


Alright. We’ve generally got two kinds of issues with time travel. The 
first, and arguably the easiest, is the Tourists. Sometimes, we get 
people from elsewhere. Past, future, whatever. Most of the time, 
they’re just passing through, or have to do something symbolic, like 
the Ojibwe hunting party that wandered through the Thanksgiving 
parade last year. Sometimes, though, they get rowdy, or a bunch of 
rednecks in a low-rider UFO decide they’re going to rip off Dean’s 
Doughnuts for our hilarious monopoly money. Either way, we get the 
pleasure of dealing with it. 


You get called in on Tourists, there are three rules. First, stay in 
cover. | don’t care if it’s a lance or a phaser gun, your vest ain’t 
gonna stop shit. Second rule is, stick to less-than-lethals. Even if 
they've got a forcefield, they still gotta breathe. Pepper spray if you 


can get close, CS gas canisters if it comes down to that. We keep a 
riot gun in every squad car, courtesy of the US Army. Still working 
on getting an MRAP. 


Third rule, and this sticks in general, trust the eggheads. If you get to 
a Tourist call and there are already a bunch of dudes in hazmat gear 
and cheap suits, or if a bunch of vans labeled "S & C Plastics" pull 
up mid-incident, be polite. They don't usually bring much firepower, 
but they're still the cavalry. Don't worry too much about calling them 
either, they monitor all our frequencies for weird shit. Well, weirder 
shit. 


Once you've got a Tourist in custody, things are still pretty 
complicated. For the most part, they’re either long dead or haven’t 
been born yet, so they’re not technically... people, legally speaking. 
What we've generally found to work is, try to recover anything 
they’ve stolen or make amends for damages, then throw them in the 
drunk tank. If you’re lucky, by the morning they'll have disappeared 
back to whenever, and it’s not your problem anymore. If you get 
some kind of time cop or old-timey marshal show up to collect them, 
just go with it. It's easier than trying to book them.