".,.Agent MacAllister?" A voice, male, on the other end, inquisitive. 
"Her wife, actually. She's in the shower." 


"Well, when you can, forward a message to her? Tell her that..." 
There was a long pause, as if she was listening to a tape that had 
skipped a track, "Mike from Samson-Cooper Pharmaceuticals 
called. I'm an informant on a case of hers..." 


"Right, drug bust. The whole LSD thing, yeah? Or Spirit Dust or 
whatever?" 


"Yeah, that's right." 
"All right, Mike, I'll tell her. Samson-Cooper..." 


"Pharmaceuticals. Samson-Cooper Pharmaceuticals. Tell her that 
exactly." 


"Will do." Harley hung up the phone and frowned. Since when did an 
informant have a blocked number? And... she'd heard that name. 
Samson-Cooper. 


She looked out the window, and sure enough, there was a bench 


outside with an advertisement plastered on the back advertising a 
painkiller manufactured by Samson-Cooper Pharma. Weird 
coincidence. 


She put the phone down, and sat on the couch, running her fingers 
through her hair. She'd been in lrag, seen people get shelled to shit, 
seen a car blow up in front of her in a convoy, and then get 
discharged with a slap on the ass on the way out because she had 
the audacity to have a girlfriend. And here she was, paranoid about 
the woman she loved cheating on her. 


She'd seen people get blown up, literally had to help pick up the 
pieces of one of her squad members so that they could be put into a 
bag, and... this is what was scaring her. The thought of her wife 
cheating on her with someone who had a blocked number. 


Quinn came out of the shower a few minutes later, wearing as much 
as Lady Godiva, but with a more sensible haircut. She dried her hair, 
and gave her a quirk of the eyebrow, and headed down the hallway. 


Harley sighed and followed. She needed this. Some time next to 
her. 


"Someone called for you," Harley said as she looked through her 
laundry. "When you were in the shower." 


"Hope you didn't forget their name." Quinn was finally getting into 
some clothes of her own, putting a brush through her hair, getting 
ready to get back to work. 


"It was... Mack? No, Mike. From Samson-Cooper Pharmaceuticals." 


Quinn dropped her hairbrush with a loud clunk and ran from the 
room, to her phone. She noted that Harley had moved it, undid the 
lock, and re-dialed the number. A voice on the other end spoke. "Did 
you pick up the roses?" 


"No, all they had was snapdragons." Quinn tugged at her hair 
slightly. "Really not the best code to use around my wife," she 
whispered into the phone. 


"We need you to come back down to Site-92 immediately." 
"...what?" Quinn's face screwed up. 


"The South Cincinnati building. We have a car coming for you. It's 
regarding the anomaly you brought in." 


"Fucking..." Quinn rubbed her face. "That's your jurisdiction. We're 
not even going to bother with Whitman-Ross. What the hell do | 
have to do with it-" 


"Does the name Jo Ann Storm mean anything to you?" 


Quinn nearly dropped her phone. Jo Ann Storm was a kid from back 
home, in Green Pastures. Went missing around the time Quinn left. 
Around the time a lot of other kids went missing. Around the time a 
girl with skin like freshly-tilled dirt had broken Quinn's heart. 


"...let me get a shirt on." She went back to her room, and looked at 
Harley, swallowing as she felt a lump form in her throat. A memetic 
lock, they called it. Something to keep her from vomiting information 
about the Veiled World to anyone who walked by. She wished that 
she could break it, that she could tell her wife about everything- the 
monsters they fought, the bureaucracy, the fact that the UIU wasn't 
just a glorified X-Files, that her work mattered... but she couldn't. 


"Harley..." she started. "I..." she wanted to tell her about home. 
About what had happened, about Jo Ann, about Jemma, about 
Clyde and Chuck and Emily and Kendall and Asher. About how her 
world went to hell in a handbasket almost seventeen years ago. But 
she couldn't. "...have work. There's a new lead, we may not have 
taken down the ring entirely." 


Harley looked at her, incredulous. There was that look again, the 
suspicion and doubt. "All right. Can | expect you back soon?" 


"Before midnight, swear to god." She approached her wife, and 
exchanged a kiss. She felt it, a bit of the passion, still there on her 
lips. A sign that things might be all right. "...Love ya, Silver." 


Harley Sterling smiled as Quinn left the room, before going to their 
bedroom window and pulling down one slat of the plastic blinds, 


pressing her nose against the winter-cold glass. She saw a pair of 
men drinking coffee outside; the same men had been having an 
argument outside their apartment a week ago. 


She sat down in bed, and opened up a book she had kept on her 
bedside for weeks; a tourist's guidebook, with two tickets used as a 
bookmark. 


Darnell was already waiting for her when Quinn was escorted down 
to Site-92 by a man who had stiff arms and no eyebrows. Darnell 
frowned at Quinn as they walked, turning into a hallway labeled 
"Processing". 


"Quinn," Darnell asked, a high tone in his voice showing some 
concern, "Who the hell is Jo Ann Storm?" 


"She's..." Quinn blinked, her tongue going numb in her mouth, her 
mind going blank, as she shook her head. "I can't. I'm sorry. Not 
cleared. Gag Order." 


"...you're fucking kidding." Darnell groaned. "God, | sometimes wish 
they would just mindwipe us like the good old days." 


"...1 want to tell you. | really do. But it's to do with home, and-" Her 
head spun as she tried to tell him, and she leaned against the 
Agent, who helped prop her up, patting her shoulder. 


"Easy there," He said, helping her get back on her feet and speaking 
into an earpiece. "Tell Memetics that we need a countermeme for a 
gag order. Send it to Dr. Zhou. It's urgent." 


Quinn nodded her thanks, and soon, the two of them were led into a 
room where the sculpture-person from Sandusky was laid out ona 
table, like a scene from an autopsy. Quinn swallowed as she looked 
at it, and then looked to Dr. Zhou, who was removing a set of 
gloves. Quinn's hands covered her mouth as she gasped. "That's-" 


"Jo Ann Storm. Resident of Green Pastures, lowa, missing since 
1998. One of a dozen missing children from that time." 


"| remember," Quinn swallowed. "I... god, that sucked for the whole 


town." 


Zhou nodded, and his pocket buzzed. He took out the phone within, 
unlocked it, and handed it to Quinn. "Watch the screen, please." 


Quinn looked at the screen. It first displayed a countdown from 3... 
2... 1... 


She fell over, only to be caught by the Foundation agent behind her. 
She didn't remember what she saw, but she felt a weight on her 
mind being lifted, a block being destroyed. She handed the phone 
back to Zhou. "...ow." 


"Counter-memes are hardly ever pleasant," he said, holding out his 
hand for the phone. "Quinn MacAllister, your mother was a Schafer, 
yes?" 


"Hold the phone,” Darnell held up his hands as Zhou did exactly 
that. "Quinn, are you going to tell me just what the fuck is going on? 
Is anyone?" 


Dr. Zhou looked between the agents and the body on the table. 
"These are the remains of Jo Ann Storm. Former Resident of Green 
Pastures, lowa, and a Class-3 Meteoromancer. She was a tool of 
Grassroots, subject to a Project SMILODON experiment, and..." 


"...my next-door neighbor," Quinn sighed, looking at Darnell, an 
apologetic look in her eyes. "I think | need to tell you about my 
hometown." 


<«Of Portals, Plasma Cannons, and Other Boring Things | Hub| 
Midnight Plane Going Anywhere» 


Midnight Plane Going Anywhere 


Previously on the UIU Series With No Name... 


Quinn MacAllister and Darnell Christman have arrived 
back in Cinncinnati to deliver the remains of an 
anomalous humanoid at the local Foundation site. After 
spending some quality time with her wife Harley, Quinn 
receives a Call regarding the remains, and finds that it is 
the body of one JoAnn Storm, a teen that disappeared 
from her hometown of Green Pastures, lowa some 
seventeen years ago. 


Quinn's gag order is finally modified so that she may tell 
Darnell about the history of her hometown, and give part 
of an explanation as to what happened. 


We now rejoin our heroes on a plane bound towards 
lowa, hot on the trail of the organization Grassroots, who 
appears to have had enough presence in Green 
Pastures to afford the acquisition of a native of the town. 


Quinn scowled in the general direction of Ohio. Behind her was 
Harley, several unpleasant conversations, and a tense phone call. 
Ahead was a town she hadn't been back to in almost twenty years, 
that had been uprooted by the organization she was now acting as a 
lackey for. 


"Mac, you okay?" Darnell asked, closing the dossier they had 
received. Half of it was documents pertaining to Grassroots, the 
other half talked about various SMILODON projects. Most of it was 
redacted. Quinn had lost interest around the time they began talking 
about suspicious activity in Las Vegas involving mutilated animals. 


"...what do you think?" Quinn asked, finishing off another airplane 
martini. She knew it was unprofessional, but the Foundation handler 
was having some of his own. "I'm going home for the sake of an 


organization of psychopaths." 
"Mac, the Foundation—" 


"Fuck the Foundation," she hissed. "Green Pastures doesn't have a 
high school anymore because of them." 


"All right," Darnell said, holding up his hand. "run it by me again. | 
got lost around the time you began explaining the Black Pasture." 


"Right," Quinn swallowed, and began explaining again. 


There have always been four families in Green Pastures. 


When the town was founded in the 1800s, four families were feuding 
over a plot of land where the soil was fertile: the Schafers, the 
Storms, the Gardeners, and the Aldermanns. And | mean outright 
feuding; we're talking gunfights in the street, houses set on fire, 
distilleries destroyed, crops decimated, kidnappings, shotgun 
weddings... 


Then, one day, the four families were going to go to outright war. It 
never happened. A man with violet spectacles and a black suit came 
to the battlefield when the first shot was fired. He plucked the bullet 
out of the air and turned it into a flower which he handed to the 
youngest girl in the Gardener family. 


‘Lam the keeper of this Green Pasture,’ he said. 'l have been 
watching you, and | have been disappointed. You four, together, 
could do great things, but instead you fight. And over what? Land 
that has been made barren?’ 


No-one had noticed, but the land they were fighting over had been 
made unworkable by the constant fighting that had been going on. 
All their efforts were for nothing. 


‘| shall make a deal,’ the man said. 'I shall give you all the capacity 
to restore this land to a fertile state once more, but you must swear 
to never draw arms at each other again. If you must kill, it will be in 
self-defense. If any of you die by the hands of another family, the 
Black Pasture will overtake this land and all within.’ 


No-one knew what the Black Pasture was, and until... shit, 1998, 
no-one even thought it existed. When they got the... capacity, they 
didn't question it. 


The Schafers — that's my family — are able to understand and 
exert their will over animals. My grandmother could talk to insects, 
and | have a cousin that can talk to wolves. It skipped my mom and 
|, and I'm pretty damn thankful for that. 


The Gardeners, as their name might suggest, can make the fruits of 
the earth grow to tremendous sizes, weave plants into intricate 
shapes, and make entire forests bloom with life. | once saw Percy 
Swift — we don't keep the names of the original families, most of the 
time — make flowers grow all over the football field during a game to 
ask Karen Walpole to prom. 


Karen was part of the third family, the Aldermanns. When they finally 
got married a few years later, she made their wedding rings from 
scratch. The Aldermanns have power over all stone and earth, and 
she pulled up gold from a quarter of a mile underground to the 
surface, and her father helped forge them. Another time, Jemma 
Adlermann pulled a meteorite out of the sky to give it to her beaux. 


Then there's the final family. The Storms. JoAnn — that's what was 
left of her back in Ohio — could call down lightning any time she 
wanted. The Storms could make it shine, or flood, or freeze. We 
would have snowball fights during the summer, and sunbathed in 
January. It was amazing. 


Quinn fingered a pendant around her neck. "JoAnn and eleven other 
people from Green Pastures disappeared in 1998. Among them 
were Percy Swift, Karen Walpole, and Jemma Aldermann. They 
were never seen again, until earlier this week." 


"...you get poetic when you're drunk, Mac." 


"Yeah, you're right," she said, putting down the still-full airplane 
martini that she had just gotten. "Monday feels like three years ago." 


"Still," Darnell frowned, looking through the dossier. "The heck did 


the Foundation do to your town?" 


Quinn's cheeks puffed. "It would be like trying to describe what 
Japan feels like to someone who's never heard of it. It's... easier to 
see, believe me." 


Darnell opened the dossier again. "Check out some of the evidence 
from the Grassroots case," he said, tapping one of the pieces of 
paper. "A hit-list. Look who's at the top." 


Quinn peered at it. "McCarthy. Not surprising. And there's Dulles 
after that, CIA director... Hoover... this can't be right." 


"What?" 


"This is what people find when they think they've found a hit list. 
These are just names of people in the government with contrived 
ways to kill them. Like... McCarthy has 'poisoned paper’ by his 
name?" 


"Yeah," Darnell's eyebrow raised as he flipped through the pages. "I 
think | know what made JoAnn Storm look like that." 


Quinn looked through the pages. "Project BLACK LODGE... 
transmutation of matter... bone into metal for better conductivity — 
holy shit is this alchemy?" 


"Yeah," Darnell said. "The main goal of BLACK LODGE was — say 
it with me now —" 


"To make a Philosopher's Stone,” Quinn rubbed her head. "They still 
haven't learned that's a bad idea? Look at what happened in New 
Dehli a few years back. Tried to make red mercury, everything was 
a mess." 


"This is the part I'm more interested in," Darnell indicated the 
passage about 'bone into metal’. "I think that's what happened to 
your friend." 


"Poor girl. She must have been in so much pain. But..." She 
frowned. "...why destroy a bank? Why did it have a portal 
underneath it?" 


Darnell looked over her shoulder, out the window. He saw the light 
pattern underneath a break in in the clouds, and recognized they 
were going over Chicago. "Are we asking the right questions?" 


"...4mm." Quinn looked at her drink, and put her finger into it. "The 
question shouldn't be 'why is it there’. The question should be... 
‘who put it there?” 


"And why did we find it?" Darnell poked his head. "Why was the 
Foundation digging into the bank vault? What incentive did they 
have?" 


Quinn's eyes widened along with Darnell's. "...they had something 
inside of it," they both gasped. 


"What the hell could they contain in a bank vault?" Darnell scratched 
his head. "Is that why they sent us away so quickly?" 


"We're the only UIU agents in the Midwest," Quinn muttered, 
realization coming onto her, "Since they closed Chicago. They knew 
that we'd find something they didn't want us to if we stuck around. 
But what didn't they want us to find?" 


Darnell snatched away Quinn's drink and downed it. "This is so far 
above our paygrade. The NSA's Abnormal Security Unit should be 
handling this, not us." He sighed. "So, now what?" 


"We can't let our handler figure out that we know."