The researchers sprint after the Eye-Pod, neither gaining any real 
advantage or getting any closer. They follow it now left, now right, 
now a long straightaway and into a dead end, a small chamber at 
the end of a long corridor. Gille jumps on the monkey and Veldi 
jumps on Gille. They grapple on the floor, neither noticing the Eye- 
Pod backing out of the room until they hear the door start to close. 
Gille looks up just in time to notice a third figure in the room: 
humanoid, but made of concrete and covered in spray paint. 


In the awkward silence that ensues, the disappearance of the 
monkey barely registers on them. 


Finally Veldi says: "I've got to blink on three. One...two... 


Katz notes the monkey statue that now sits atop his empty inbox. 
He's already senior staff, but his secretary is out sick and nobody 
from the temp pool can seem to ever type up his briefs just the way 
he likes them. He looks through the stack of neatly-formatted 
documents before him and nods in satisfaction. Yes, the devil will 
have his due, but he does love a nice-looking brief. Worth it. 


He picks up the monkey and goes into the hallway outside his office, 
waiting for someone going in the right direction who looks sufficiently 
junior and sufficiently gullible. Soon enough, a cub researcher who 
he doesn't recognize passes by, and Sheldon intercepts him. 


"Excuse me, young man, could | ask a favor? Someone left this in 
my office and they need it for a team-building exercise in the main 
cafeteria. Just take it up there and someone will show you what to 
do next." 


He feels slightly bad, watching the eager youth hurry down the hall 
with the monkey, but better him than Sheldon, and in any case this 
will teach him a number of valuable lessons. 


Doctor Briar sighed, looking over the contents of his small office. It 
had been a long, hard road to get here. So many times, he'd thought 
he would die. So many times, he had lost what he thought of as 
"everything", only to build himself up so he would have something 
else to lose when the time came again. It had certainly not been 
easy, but he'd managed, somehow... 


He always wished it could have been easier, though. If only there 
had been some way he could have made his journey to a respected 
member of senior staff without having to endure so much suffering. 
Of course, he had only been a low-level recruit in the Foundation 
when they stopped holding the Staff Prank Wars. He had heard of 
them, of course, and how the cleverest member of the Foundation's 
personnel stood to be raised to Senior Staff for winning. It was truly 
a shame that he had been so new when they held the last of them, 
an all but nameless lab assistant, not trusted with anything more 
important than proofreading documents...but then, that was his 
advantage, wasn't it? 


Briar smiled, looking at the assembled items and documents sitting 
on his desk. At the top of the pile was a death certificate. Just 
another Foundation employee that had finally met his end, but to the 
elderly man at the desk, an opportunity. After all, permanent 
ownership didn't extend past death. Most importantly, however, was 
the small locked box on top of the pile. There were so many 
anomalous objects with temporal effects in Foundation custody that 
they hardly bothered to catalogue them all. No one would notice he 
had "borrowed" SCP- among a batch of other research materials, 
and the letter he planned to mail would not be going anywhere that it 
would be looked for. Chuckling to himself, Doctor Briar took out a 
fountain pen, and began to write. 


Years earlier, a much younger version of the same man breathed 
heavily, hiding in a cubical and shaking. In his hand he held a much- 
folded piece of heavy parchment, written upon in flowing calligraphy. 
Nervous, he muttered the words aloud as he re-read the page, 
"Volunteer to assist in accounting. Short-staffed due to people 
calling in sick to avoid the contest. Agree to witness a contract. 


False name. Render null and void..." 


He shook his head in disbelief, dizzy with the implications. It couldn't 
be that easy, could it? Of course, he had barely dared believe what 
he held in his hands until the prank war began to unfold, exactly as 
the note claimed it would. Still, it seemed too good to be true. A deal 
with the Devil shouldn't be so simple to thwart, even if it wasn't really 
the Devil. Of course, the plan wasn't over yet. Just botching Katz's 
deal wouldn't much of a prank by itself, after all. Steeling himself, the 
younger Briar stepped out of the cubical, and announced that he 
was going on his lunch break. As he entered into the corridor, he put 
on aring, and pulled out the small electronic device from his pocket. 


At the doors of the cafeteria, a young researcher was stopped by a 
polite cough. He turned, his face guileless and smiling. A dark- 
haired man snatched the bundle out of his hands before he had a 
moment to react. 


"Oh, thank goodness | caught you in time! | am SO sorry! It seems 
that my colleague gave you the wrong article by mistake. This is the 
one they need in there." 


A small device was pressed into the researcher's hands. He babbled 
for a few moments about how glad he was to help, and how sorry he 
was that the other man had to chase him all the way here. Briar, in 
turn, made his excuses, politely stating that it was no trouble, but he 
really had to get back to work. He gave the hapless researcher 
some basic instructions on how to set up the device, and told him to 
just "get it started for them". As he hurried to return SCP-399 to 
containment, he could hear his modified MP3 player begin to loop 
Rick Astley's most famous composition with enough bass to shake 
the light fixtures. The altered lyrics, bragging of the genius of one 
Sheldon Katz, could just barely be made out from where he stood. 
Since he didn't have an office, Briar made a note to check his locker 
later on. 


A D-Class that had been fortunate enough to avoid all of the chaos 
of the day was desperately looking for a place to hide. He found an 
isolated cell, and quickly opened the door, failing to notice the 


number "173" emblazoned above the door. 


The moment the door was fully open, he stepped through the frame. 
He saw two men on the floor, and then he looked up. 


He recognized the sculpture a few seconds too late. 


Veldi and Gille charged him, threw him in the cell, and quickly closed 
the door. The sound of bones breaking followed shortly after. 


Veldi breathed a sigh of relief. "Well, that was fun. Next time, let's 
check doors before going in them. Don't want Blinky to be let out." 


Gille was shivering from the experience. Veldi leaned down. "Oh, by 
the way... | think ahead." He pointed out that the wall opposite 173's 
containment had been painted red. Gille was still in a stupor, so 
Veldi walked away and pressed a button on his phone. A tinny, 
electronic voice came from above the door: "Leggo my Eggo- 
carrying Lego Winnebago full of—" The sound was cut short by a wall 
of tomato juice. 


Veldi checked the video feed on his phone again. Yep, the monkey 
was on his desk. He figured that he should set some more traps so 
that it wouldn't stay away for long. He hurried to his supplies. 


Veldi returned to his office, hoping that some son-of-a-bitch hadn't 
gotten there before him. He set his supplies down, opened the door, 
and glanced at his hard-won prize... 


And there was no monkey statue. He checked again. Whoever had 
run off with it had left a note. Hoping it didn't have some G d-awful 
cognitohazard, he read: 


Unless properly defended, your monkey statue is my monkey statue. 
See you later, noob. 
~ Agent Gummy Dragon 


Impossible! You couldn't just take the statue. you had to earn it. 
Veldi searched his office in a panic. He opened his cabinets... 


And a small puppy stared him in the eye. 


And that puppy's excited barking brought puppies out of the 
drawers, trashcan, and hallway. Veldi couldn't take it, and ran 
screaming from the adorable mob of canines pursuing him. 


Gummy laughed as he viewed the security feed from his office. 
Sending Mr. Deeds to hide the statue behind a potted plant, fill 
Veldi's office with puppies, and plant the note he had written, all 
while Veldi was out, had been easier than expected. Gummy had 
barricaded his office door and stocked up on sandwiches and water 
bottles, so he should have been safe. 


Dr. Len Blue frantically pushed a large storage cart out into an open 
field outside Site-19 after "taking a week off." He was, if nothing 
else, determined to get that damned monkey. 


Over the past week, he had stolen the flying pig, as detailed under 
the Log of Anomalous Items, from Site-18 and used SCP-038 to 
make almost a hundred duplicates before returning the original. He 
had stolen SCP-000-J from Professor Snider while he was away and 
quickly returned it after ordering SCP-184. He had stolen multiple 
Scranton Reality Buoys from a manufacturing facility. He had bought 
large amounts of wood, cardboard, ropes, pillows, blankets, bread, 
water, hog feed, fireworks, slingshots, and iron pellets. And now, he 
was going to pull of the most legendary prank of all time. 


He stopped the cart right in front of a large structure covered in 
green tarp and yanked it down, revealing a very large play fort, three 
and a half meters wide, constructed of wood, pillows and cardboard, 
decorated with castle turrets and containing six rooms: a central 
room filled with computer equipment and containing a generator, a 
barracks for the pigs with multiple hammocks, an armory full of 
fireworks and slingshots with ammunition, a storehouse full of stolen 
rations, bread, water, and hog feed, a hangar for the launch of 
armed flying pigs, and a room containing four Scranton Reality 
Buoys suspended in the middle of the room with ropes, with wires 
attached to it. 


Dr. Blue, exhausted, unloaded bags of animate, plastic flying pigs 
from the overturned cart and dumped them into the hammocks after 
taking them in. Then, he hauled in SCP-184, still attached to its 


electromagnet, dropped it in the control room, and called Agent 
Gummy Dragon. 


He began the conversation. "This is your last chance, Agent. Come 
out and surrender the monkey or I'll unleash my latest work of 
magic: the unstoppable, growing Expand-O-Fort. Site-19 will be torn 
asunder by my trained armies of cybernetic flying pigs, and | will 
have the monkey in the end." 

"Do it, then. If it's so unstoppable, I'd like to see you actually unleash 
it," replied Gummy. And at that, he hung up, and spliced into the 
security feed of the grasslands outside Site-19. 


Dr. Blue turned off the electromagnet, and SCP-184 began 
expanding the interior walls of the fort. But the Scranton Reality 
Buoys nullified the physically impossible interior-only effect of 
SCP-184, and the entire fort expanded. Released from this effect, 
which had to expend energy bending spacetime, the fort could 
expand very quickly and immediately after SCP-184 entered it. 


Agent Gummy Dragon could only watch in horror as the fortress 
expanded a meter in two seconds and kept going even faster. But 
he knew he was in a bad spot here. If he called any kind of authority 
about this, everyone at Site-19 would be disciplined for the prank 
war. With no other options, he used his conference phone to call Dr. 
Bright, Dr. Veldi, Dr. Clef, and Agent Strelnikov, explained the 
situation frantically. 


Dr. Clef, mortified, responded, "No." After a long pause, he said, "He 
has 184." 


Everyone collectively gasped. "I'm calling an MTF," said Dr. Clef. 
"Bright and Veldi, get EMP grenades, take a jeep and get into that 
fortress as fast as you can. Strelnikov, get to a machine gun tower 
and set that thing on fire with tracers. Gummy, hold on to that 
monkey, and keep it away from Blue as long as possible." And at 
that, Dr. Clef hung up. 


The fortress was already forty meters wide, having taken ona 
pyramid shape, and new rooms were forming. Dr. Blue's army of 
computer-controlled pigs was mutating and growing. Dr. Blue keyed 
in a command, and hundreds of winged pigs spewed out of a large 


hangar in the side of the fortress. Agent Strelnikov reached the top 
of a guard tower with hundreds of incendiary tracers and loaded 
them into the heavy machine gun turret. Leaning out the window, he 
opened fire on the tip of the fortress, setting the top of it on fire. 


The Jeep shot out of the gates of Site-19. Dr. Blue, not worried, 
locked the hundreds of three-inch fully functional winged pigs onto 
their Jeep. Dr. Veldi pulled an EMP grenade out of his pocket and 
threw it into the swarm, disabling almost all of their robotic implants 
and causing them to fly off in all directions. Moments later, it crashed 
full force into a sliding door made of abnormally dense pillows. 


When Bright and Veldi recovered, they found themselves inside a 
hangar of computer-controlled toy pigs made entirely of fireworks. In 
the back of the room was a door, three slingshots made of pillows, 
and an iron computer manual. 


"Come on!," yelled Dr. Bright, running for the door. "We have to go 
deeper!" 


The doctors suddenly found themselves in a room containing a 
single two-meter-wide Scranton Reality Buoy, composed entirely of 
cardboard. Dr. Veldi threw an EMP grenade into it. The grenade 
punched through the SRB and came right out the other side before 
detonating. The entire buoy then collapsed as though it was made of 
rigid paper. 


Then, suddenly, everything around the two doctors collapsed, 
destroying several more SRBs around them, resulting in a chain 
reaction that tore through the outside of the fort. 


Bright and Veldi survived, and the Expand-O-Fort was collapsed. It 
appeared that SCP-184 had been turned off. The pigs were mostly 
deactivated and fell from the sky, and helicopters from MTF Psi-7 
"Home Improvement" cleaned up the rest. 


And Dr. Blue wasn't in the fort. The whole time, he had been waiting 
for the fort to get big enough for him to shut off SCP-184 and then 
use all of its power reserves to teleport the monkey into his hands. 
He was riding a seven-foot robotic toy flying pig away from the 
rubble, carrying Doctors Bright and Veldi with him on a 50-pound 


rope made of slingshots which SCP-050 had affixed to the pig as a 
prank, before transferring to Dr. Veldi, pranking him by setting off 
one of his EMP grenades, and then back to Dr. Blue. And then the 
deactivated pig crashed. 


Later, after a lot of amnestic spraying and Dr. Blue's reassignment, 
Dr. Bright discovered the monkey in his locker. 


Sentimentality 


Doctor Amy Sze walked past the masses of employees gathered at 
the cafeteria. For her, it would be another regular day of work - cut 
down the paperwork tree that grows on her desk, witness some 
operations, maybe watch the deaths of a D-class or two. Working in 
the Foundation for over 5 years, she thought she'd seen it all by 
now. 


"That's it! I'm leaving!" The man stood up, grabbed his jacket, and 
slammed the apartment door on his way out. 


"Daddy?" The 5-year-old Amy stared aimlessly at the wooden door, 
while her mother broke down into sobbing beside her. 


"Daddy..." 


"Careful with the scalpel, Rikard." Amy pointed with her suited hand 
to a massive irregular bulge protruding from the D-class's stomach 
wall. "You see that red line? Cut right there, and then cauterize the 
vessel." She watched as the new researcher to the biohazardous 
research team steadily cut away at the tumor that was once 
D-61293's stomach. She smiled as the new guy lifted the separated 
tumor from its growth place and placed it in a vat of formalin.