Time passed, as it does. The newcomer was tagged as a Black Box 
SCP, known by a descriptor, not a number. The Duck Man, or 
"TDM" for short. He was very busy for the first, oh, hour or twelve, 
telling Six everything he knew about Mann's plans. He was then 
placed in a Humanoid Containment Chamber, and ignored for a 
couple of weeks, as Six routed out all of the mad doctor's plans and 


puppets. 


But after all that, it came time to decide what to do with him. Jack 
Bright and O5-6 stood in the observation lounge, watching as TDM 


stared upwards, trying desperately to entertain himself in between 
feedings. 


"What did he just say?" Six leaned forward, turning up the volume. 


"| think it was something along the lines of 'Wow. 12 meters high. | 
didn't think they actually did that." Jack fiddled with his amulet, 
staring at the man before them. "Do you think this guy is on the 
level?" 


"He's not a Bixby, if that's what you're asking. I've had people testing 
him, covertly. If he could alter reality, he'd have done something by 
now. Tests show him to be completely human, identical on a 
quantum level to a man currently living in the United States. All the 
ID he had on him when we put him in here is identical to the real 
one. Well, with one difference. The him on the outside is a 
millionaire. Won a lottery or something. This one worked at Wal- 
Mart." 


"Thought you said he wasn't a Bixby? Sounds like some major wish 
fulfillment to me." 


"Enh. Might have been something like that. But this guy? He can't do 
anything now. Except make use of the things he's ‘written’ in before." 


"So you think he really created us?" 


"No. I'm not that pessimistic. | think in his universe, he had some, 
we'll call it a connection. It lets him know way too much about us, 
but he's not a god, or a creator of any kind.” Six pauses to pull out a 
cigar and light it up. The smoke alarm begins to go off, but a quick 
glare from Six and the alarm is rapidly silenced. 


"Do you really have to do that?" 
"What's the point of having power, if you can't abuse it?" 


"And you think he can fix me? And TJ? And..." Bright swallows. 
"Sarah?" 


"| think he can. He knows the shortcuts, he said." 


"What does he want? 


"Protection. He doesn't want anyone to know he's here. He says he 
gets nightmares thinking about what MC&D, or the Cl would do to 
him. He also seems to think if he does too much, people from his 
world will notice him, and ...get rid of him. He calls it deletion. He's 
scared to death of Kondraki and Clef, thinks they'll ‘decommission’ 
him. He's willing to help us with whatever we want, as long as we 
keep him fed... and entertained.” 


"Entertained?" 


"He knows he can't have access to the outside world.” Six blows a 
smoke ring. "So he wants games. Computer, video, all that sort. And 
books. Something to keep him healthy." His mouth curls in a half- 
smile. "And SCP-1004." 


Jack can't help but double take. "One thousand four? Does he know 
what it does?" 


"He seems to think he can handle it." Six found himself smirking. 
"And if he can't, well... We'll have found out all he Knows by the time 
it makes him incapable of proceeding.” 


"You're an asshole. | love it." 


Now. At this point, we could go on about the things The Duck Man 
did. The SCPs he fixed. The plots he stopped with his information, 
or the other things he told people that they shouldn't have known. 
Instead? | think it best to end this tale with a small view of what the 
guards watching him see. 


Agent Klein sat down beside Senior Agent Hanks, sliding his card 
into the station to clock into his assignment. "All right, sir. I'm here to 
take over observation duties from you. Anything | need to know?" 


"This guy masturbates more than anyone. Ever. Seriously, it's 
disgusting. | don't even want to know what he's looking up on that 
thing. The sounds are bad enough." Hanks shakes his head. "Look, 
this is an easy job. The skip isn't dangerous. He just sits there, 


playing video games, and watching porn. Your main duty is to poke 
him every now and then, make him get active. That's what the 
treadmill and weights are for. The Overseers want him to stay 
healthy." 


"Is he talking to himself in there?" 


"Same thing he always says. | don't get it, but here, listen." Hanks 
leaned forward, turning up the volume so the two could hear the 
words The Duck Man would be repeating for the rest of his long life. 


"Please don't downvote me. Please don't downvote me. Please don't 
downvote me." 


Kunststoff Strand 


Research Assistant Sam lbsen was not a fan of his new assignment. 
He was not a fan of it at all. 


It was the architecture, he thought. Here we was, in the middle of 
the Pacific Ocean, on a tropical island no less, and it still felt co/d. It 
was this damn Soviet architecture: the blocky concrete halls seemed 
to suck out the life of the place. It just went out with the draft. There 
shouldn't have been a draft, of course, but there was, and the draft 
brought the smell. 


Agh, the smell...seagull shit and oil and salt and garbage and dead 
fish and burning rubber, all fermenting under the clouds that swirled 
around the island with the shattered peak. It wasn’t a smell that one 
got used to; it perpetuated its foulness day in and day out without 
stop. 


Then there was the garbage. The island was covered in it. 
Everything was brought here eventually, everything thrown in the 
ocean and forgotten. And there were people living in it even: blind 
mutants scraping out a pitiful existence in the trash. 


He focused on his work, hard as it was at that hour. Half of the 
graphs were falling apart, the other half only half finished. They were 
trying to find a pattern to how the island moved, some reliable way 
to trace it. It didn’t obey currents, or tectonic plates, or anything but 
its own whims. Could an island have whims? The Russians hadn’t 
figured it out when they were here, and now Ibsen was similarly 
spinning in circles. 


The door on the other side of the makeshift kitchen creaked open, 
bringing with it a new wave of gag-inducing stench, and a man. He 
was older, somewhere in his late seventies, with greying hair tied 
back in a short braid and a neat beard. His glasses were small, 
those old ones with the circular lenses. He wore a heavy red jacket, 
and carried a big black doctor’s bag in one hand. 


He shut the door. The smell lessened somewhat as most of it was 
left outside in the night. 


“Guten Morgen, Herr Ibsen.” The visitor walked over to the table with 
his characteristic limp. 


“That late?” 


The older man reached into his coat pocket, removing a silver 
pocket watch. 


“One-twenty-four A.M, so yes.” His accent was thick, but 
understandable. He clicked the watch closed. “Are you making any 
progress?” 


“Nothing.” Ibsen put down his pencil and sat back in his chair. 
Enough with this, then. A little conversation and then bed. “Division 
P had no idea what was going on here, and we still don’t know 
anything. The island just moves around, and the dimensions of it 
keep shifting. The lower slopes are almost completely unknown, 
save for the docks. Three months here and we’ve gotten nothing.” 


“Maybe not nothing. Maybe the answer lies within what you already 
know.” 


“Maybe, but then I’d have to know what | know first, and the Cyrillic 
alphabet isn’t helping. And anyway what were you doing out so late, 
doctor?” 

“| was in the village. There was a baby to deliver.” 

“Success?” 

“A girl. Strong by their standards, blind and frail by ours.” The old 
doctor nodded his head, smiling. “Still, a good night. The tribe is still 
celebrating.” 


“You take what excuses you can, | suppose.” 


“Life is a reason, not an excuse. It ought to be celebrated more 
often. Speaking of celebration, Herr Ibsen...” the old doctor reached 
down into his bag: seconds later his hands returned to the tabletop 


with a bottle of wine and a cup. “It is my wedding anniversary today. 
Would you mind celebrating with me? | am afraid | do not have any 
other glasses.” 


“Oh, yeah...hold on a bit.” lbsen carefully put his papers in their 
appropriate piles at the edge of the table, away from potential spills. 
After a moment of thought, he put them back in their file folder 
where they belonged. 


The cup was easy enough to find in the cupboards, though it was a 
chipped coffee mug instead of a wine glass. It would have to do. He 
brought it back to the table. 


“How long have you been married?” Ibsen asked as the old doctor 
uncorked the bottle and poured. He was honestly quite curious 
about it: The old doctor had remained a mystery these past three 
months, an outside specialist brought in as consultant for the 
Foundation study of E-2934. 


“Fifty-five years. This would be fifty-nine.” 
“Oh...I’m sorry.” 


The old doctor smiled in that way perfected by grandfathers since 
the beginning. 


“For what? She died in her bed, at peace, surrounded by her 
children and grandchildren. | have seen a great many people die, 
Herr Ibsen, and there are far worse fates than to spend a few last 
moments with those you love. Come now, let us celebrate fifty-five 
years of life and love. A toast.” He held up his own cup. “To Winry. 
Obwohl ich sie vermisse, ist sie in meiner Nahe.” 


“To Winry.” 


Outside, the melancholy wind bit and moaned from the cracks in the 
dead mountain. A wave brought with it an dead turtle, choked on a 
plastic bag and suspended in oily foam. A blind man in a hut told a 
story of when the sky burned. A mother and her child slept. 


Eventually, the light in the kitchen was turned out. 


Occurrence of Oddness 


The heat of the afternoon was turning into the cool calm of a June 
evening. The pines stood straight and tall as they had for decades, 
shadows barring the orange light of the setting sun. Birds sang. 
Bugs hummed. 


It was summer, and all was well. 


Two sparrows landed on a bush. One twittered to the other, and the 
other twittered back. The conversation continued for some time, 
going on about the current state of sparrow affairs: seeds, females, 
and the implications of quantum theomechanics within the avatar- 
overlap matrix of a multiple-revelation continuum model. 


Sparrows tend to have very heady conversations, even if they often 
have to repeat large segments due to one of the conversants not 
paying attention. 


The twittering continued for some time. 


From the distance, there was a sound. A murmuring at first, and 
then a whine, and then the sound of people screaming. 


aaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH 


The bush exploded, just as one of the sparrows was about to lay 
into the other for his foolish invoking of Twitterit’s Fallacy of Greater 
Faith Variables. A golf cart, decked with yellow and red flags, shot 
through the twigs and pine needles and leaves and flew for a brief 
moment, though that brief moment of flight was more glorious than 
what the Wright Brothers could had ever conceived. It hit the ground 
hard, swerving back and forth to near-tipping, the three occupants 
flailing and falling about and just barely holding on with white 
knuckles. The three were screaming, quite loudly, and consisted of 
1) A boy of about twelve, with a blue and white baseball cap and 
vest. 2) A girl of the same age, with braces and a lavender sweater 


3) A man of thirty or so, with rather impressive sideburns and a scar 
on his left cheek. 


Behind them, there was the rumble of something tearing up a tree 
and bellowing in a “I am going to tear out your intestines, rip off your 
arms, fashion them into nunchucks, and then proceed to beat you to 
death with them,” tone of voice. 


The screaming, which had petered out a bit in order for the 
screamers to catch their breath, resumed after a quick look over the 
shoulder. 


Oh, hey there. 


Now, you’re probably wondering why a grown man is hanging on for 
his life to a golfcart being haphazardly driven through the woods by 
a pair of screaming twelve year olds. That’s good, you should be 
wondering that. 


You're probably also wondering what we're running away from, but 
I'll get to that later. 


So, yeah. My name’s Greg Wallacher, and | work for the 
Foundation. Site 33 field office, Gravity Falls branch. 


| should probably start at the beginning of this whole shindig. 


See, Gravity Falls is just one of those weird little towns where weird 
things happen. Generally the weirdness precedes us, sometimes it 
doesn’t, and in cases like Gravity Falls nobody’s sure any more. 


We have a pretty simple gig up here. Mostly we maintain good 
relations with the local Kongs and keep a watch out for the Saucer 
flock, but there’s plenty of weird shit we have corralled that still 
needs to be officially cataloged. We're still trying to figure out what’s 
going on with this town, though compared to some of the other 
urban long-term insertion jobs (| have a friend who was on cleanup 
for the shitstorm in Carbondale a few years back), it’s a pretty good 
deal. 


Everyone started screaming for real when a bunch of 
people started bleeding and going limp. But they started 
speaking, in unison. They were the chosen, but | wasn't 
among them. 


[REDACTED]: <subject covers face with hands> 


[REDACTED]: They ... | don't know what they were 
saying, they were chanting it, but people were still 
screaming, | was screaming, and was yelling 
something at the opened door, and then George got 
up, walked up the door and .. he jumped. 


Dr. Glass: He jumped out of the airplane? 


[REDACTED]: No! Not out of the airplane, there wasn't 
an ‘outside’ anymore, it was ... it was Paradise, what 
had been talking about, just like he said... 


[REDACTED]: That's when the angel came ... | couldn't 
see very well, | was in the far back, but suddenly lots of 
people got up, and the screaming mostly stopped and 
the chanting got louder, and was still yelling 
something, and then more angels came, angels 
everywhere angels and they ripped and ripped and 
ripped and harvested but the harvested kept speaking, 
kept chanting just like said, and there were hands, 
so many hands, pushing me towards the door, and an 
angel, ripping ripping harvesting around me and | wanted 
to get away, | ran towards the door, but ... 


[REDACTED]: <subject is seen breathing heavily> 


Dr. Glass: Take it easy, [REDACTED]. What happened, 
then? 


[REDACTED]: | don't know. When | woke up, | was like 
this. <subject motions towards legs; both have been 
nearly severed at the knees> 


Dr. Glass: You don't remember anything else? We know 


Most of the town is on Foundation payroll in some way or another. | 
think the number’s like sixty percent of the permanent population or 
something. Generally speaking, the overwhelming majority don’t 
know it. You only have some agents (twenty-three, last time | 
counted), a few who know that there’s something up with the town, 
and the rest just know who to call when things get odd and don’t ask 
any questions. 


Lovely little town, really, and would you look at that, | have digressed 
completely. 


So then. The story. Maybe a week or so ago, Stan was telling me 
how his great niece and nephew were going to be visiting for the 
summer and help out around the Mystery Shack. 


| told him that was a bad idea (would you let twelve year olds muck 
around in the building right on top to an entrance to the facility? 
Didn't think so.), ranking between jumping into our tank of piranha- 
maids while slathered in barbeque sauce and attempting to out- 
dance the multibear.