quickly now. The being's throat worked quickly, achieving that final 


taste, the gold it had been digging for. Not so bad. Spicy. A little 
sour. It would work for a couple of days. 


And then, they were back in the alleyway. Kit was dressed, though 
his fly was down, and he felt comfortable - relaxed. The being 
looked the same as it did before, despite the power now racing 
through its equivalent of veins. It had stolen what it needed from Kit, 
and now Kit needed his payment. 


Before that could be offered, Kit took a breath. "I need a cigarette. 
Do you want one?" 


The woman man thing moved its non-fully formed head towards him. 
It had many gaping orifices, but none of which could be called a 
mouth, and nothing inside that could be called lungs. 


"Just me, then." 


As Kit lit up and clumsily did his fly up, sprinkling ash on his groin, 
the multi-orificed being in front of him opened one of its many holes. 
This time, not taking, but giving. Kit's eyes lit up as at the purple, 
ribbed innards, and he reached inside to grab the packets laying 
temptingly inside. 


“Thanks, boss," he murmured huskily, breathing smoke into where 
its face should be. 


One lip on the creature's lower limb curled into a grimace of distaste 
as Kit turned, left the alleyway, left his sleeping bag, and fucked right 
off into his world of Bloom. 


« And Then, Kit Slept | Hub | Kit's Brotherhood» 


kit's Brotherhood 


"... This time, it really is the end of the world," Kit mumbled shakily 
down the phone. "This time, | promise. There's zombies everywhere, 
and | don't have a gun. Blake, I..." He hesitated, stumbling over his 
words as he thought of what he was asking, "...need you." 


It was cold, outside. The wind was bitter and biting — a promise of 
winter on the way. Kit didn't like being in the public view, but his flat 
wasn't safe anymore. The Duvet Queen had taken up residence, 
and was quietly pulling cat after cat from a portal that had appeared 
in his disorganised living room. And Kit was allergic. 


Outside offered some relief, but few people had a normal face 
anymore. They were mauled, disfigured, silently begging for brains. 
Maybe they weren't saying anything, but he knew what they wanted. 
Brains. His, maybe. Though his thoughts were cancerous, his brain 
was infected, it was stained with broken thoughts and buried 
memories. Kit suddenly realised the phone against his ear had gone 
silent. But with the silence came a promise — Blake was coming. 
Blake would help him fight against the zombies, and maybe even 
evict the Duvet Queen, the alien creature who could no longer read 
words that came from any sort of authority. 


By the time Blake came up in his car, tires squealing, most of the 

zombies had gone, and Kit could breathe again. But seeing Blake 
was siill a relief, like it always was. Blake climbed out of his smart, 
but practical, car, and glowered at his brother. 


"Zombies, huh." He stated, flatly. 


"Yes. No. Yes. But they're gone now." Kit reassured. Or tried to 
reassure. His voice was trembling, and so was his body. Everything 
was sore, which happened if one stood outside, staring at nothing, 
for many hours. He felt a sharp pang in his lower back that reminded 
him of an injury he had gotten when he fell off his moped many 
years ago, in an overexcited reaction to seeing a rainbow. The pain 


came first, then the opiates, then addiction, and then... Bloom. 
Bloom had come next, in all her beauty. But Kit had been out for a 
while now, avoiding the alleyway where tongues and flashlights 
waited to pounce. 


"Fine. Let's go inside." Blake stated, staying put, knowing better than 
to approach his brother when his whole body seemed to be 
trembling with electricity. 


"No! Shit. No." Kit stated, firmly. "...We can't." ‘And | can't tell you 
why.' His brain concluded, clumsily. 


Blake didn't question anything anymore. He didn't want to know 
which delusion was preventing his brother from going inside. 


".,.Don't worry. It's nothing that's going to get me detained." Kit 
muttered, his voice sounding almost normal as his body twitched 
outside of his control. Bloom withdrawal was a hard trek, after all. 
"Not like the seven-year mirror sentence." He concluded, after a 
moment, as he started walking — leading the way to no-where. 


Blake followed, keeping a respectful distance, watching his brother's 
back -— literally as well as figuratively. After a moment, he dared to 
speak again. 


"| hate to break it to you, Kit. But you don't get a seven-year prison 
sentence for breaking a mirror." 


Kit stopped in his tracks. 


"Wait, what?" He mumbled around an unlit cigarette. The wind kept 
blowing out his lighter. Should have kept the old one that seemed to 
never seemed to go out. 


"Yeah. Sorry buddy, you're getting curses and crimes confused. You 
spent seven-years in prison for breaking a mirror..." 


He motioned Kit to finally keep walking. 
"Over a toddler's head," he concluded. 


Kit looked momentarily confused, then shrugged. 


"Wait, you heard about that?" 


"You gave my number to the prison guards. Or, should | say 
guardias de prisiones. So, yeah, | heard about it. In Spanish." 


"Huh," Kit mumbled, then let out a noise of triumph as his cigarette 
was lit. 


"When they told me about it, trying to get my Euros, y'know, | told 
them... | mean, in Spanish, | said. 'A poor innocent mirror?! Fuck 
him!" Blake spat on the ground. It was exaggerated, it was 
humouring his brother — but at the same time, Blake was thinking 
about how he could never let Kit near his own son. 


"Hm. Well, every day is a journey!" 


"Yeah, every day. You were there for a day! Look, we all been ina 
k-hole, but the party has to stop at some point." 


"And that point is... mirror smashing?" 
"That's probably the point beyond the point." 


"Mmm." Kit mumbled, non-committedly. "Well, | still don't get why a 
mirror would get upset enough to have me locked up." 


They walked in the drizzle for a while. If anyone saw the fresh 
sutures on Kit's arms, they blanched or blushed and looked away, 
suddenly aware they were trespassing on something painfully 
private. 


Blake didn't ask. He didn't trust the answer, and never could. 


Eventually, they stopped in a small green area that couldn't be quite 
called a park. Kit lead them to sit on a damp bench and Blake didn't 
complain. He was just thinking about how long he had to spend with 
Kit for it to be considered okay — for anything that happened 
afterwards to not be his responsibility. Although with both their 
parents gone, Blake couldn't help but feel some sense of 
responsibility to his younger brother. Kit wouldn't even look out for 
himself, and no-one would look out for him. But still, something 
needed to be said when it was apparent Kit was more on this planet 


than his own. 


"Look, Kit. I've got a wife who's addicted to social media, anda 
goddamn mouth to feed on the way. Soon, I'm not going have time 
for your shit. Soon, no-one's going to have time for your shit." 


Despite the apparent harshness of the words themselves, what 
Blake said lacked the venom it needed. Instead, he just sounded 
tired, and despondent. 


‘Despondent,' Kit thought to himself, 'a word used by survivors of 
suicide.’ He came up with his own definition that no dictionary would 
ever use. Absently, he hoped Blake wouldn't kill himself. He couldn't 
think what to say at his wake, and what he would want to tell him 
after he was gone that he couldn't tell him now, with his muddled 
thoughts and apparent delusions. 


"| know," was what Kit said instead, like he always did. The 
repeating pattern of his brother swearing he wouldn't be able to 
respond to his phone calls — and the repeating pattern of him 
pretending he understood when he was many kilometres away from 
being close to understanding. 


In the absence of words, Kit placed two cigarettes in his mouth and 
lit them. After a second, he thought to offer one to his brother, who 
took it wordlessly. They both just stared into the trees in silence 
whilst smoke gathered around them. 


"You smoke too much," Blake finally said, as his cigarette nearly 
burnt itself out. 


"...No such thing as ‘too much' unless it kills you," Kit muttered in 
distant reply. 


Blake looked at his watch. It had only been nearly 20 minutes. It felt 
like hours had stretched distantly between them. But really, he 
should get home soon. Amber was only going to be patient for so 
long, and, heavily gravid in her last month of pregnancy, her mood 
was growing short as her discomfort grew more. 


"Is it..." Blake thought for the right word, "...okay for you to go home 


While mechanical considerations such as animal size, genital 
structure, and internal versus external fertilization often prevent 
dissimilar species from mating, methods of artificial fertilization are 
effective in 90% of trials. 


Combinations of genes and traits in offspring conceived within 
SCP-889 are generally evenly split between the male and female 
parents. However, biological aspects such as body size, blood type, 
and homeostasis are necessarily parallel to the female parent. 
Hybrids are in all cases sterile, and there is a direct correlation 
between the genomic dissimilarity of parents and the lifespan and 
genetic fitness of offspring. 


SCP-889 has also exhibited limited capability to interfere with the 
intra-species recognition of animals, making non-conspecific 
animals within SCP-889 much more likely to attempt to mate. For 
this reason, care should be taken when exposing human beings to 
SCP-889. 


The SCP-889 has not demonstrated any observable effect on 
asexual or unicellular organisms. Cross-testing between kingdoms 
has been similarly unsuccessful. 


SCP-889 is maintained under the jurisdiction of Bio-Research Site 
32. A small breeding facility has been erected near SCP-889 to 
provide test animals and laboratory capabilities. 


Experiment Log 889-A: A number of hybridizing experiments were 
conducted between / /2009 and / /2010 using SCP-889. All 
experiments were conducted using artificial insemination. A 
selection of relevant tests is included below. 


Experiment-889-A-1 

Date: / /2009 

Male Parent: Albino Laboratory Rat (Rattus norvegicus) 

Female Parent: Albino Laboratory Rat (Rattus norvegicus) 
Gestation Time: 21 days 

Number of Offspring: 7 

Notes: This experiment was conducted as a control. Results were 
normal. Adult offspring healthy, average 22cm in length. 


now, do you think? | have to get milk before | go home, and the 
shops are nearly closed." 


Maybe it was a Sunday. Kit blinked, stubbing the cigarette out on the 
bench. He had a dull awareness of days passing, but rarely 
registered their names. If the shops were closing whilst the sun 
wasn't nearly set, it was probably Sunday. Probably. 


"...Yeah. | think. She'll be gone by now." Kit concluded, after a 
moment of dull thought. The cats and their cloned kittens would 
hang around for a while, but he didn't have to stumble over the girl in 
his living room. 


Blake didn't ask who she was. He doubted it was a bedfellow, with 
Kit's history, and decided it was much more likely to be a delusion 
who had chased him out of the house in the first place. 


By the time Blake had walked Kit home and followed him the three 
stories to his flat, he clocked in an hour with his brother. Who could 
argue that an hour was too short a time? Who could argue that, if 
anything were to happen when he left, it was somehow Blake's 
fault? 


Kit let him in, after a moment of hesitating. Blake noted him staring 
at the floor, eyes tracking something that wasn't there. At least not 
for him. What was there for Kit was another question. He trailed him 
into the conjoined kitchen/living room, and watched Kit slump 
heavily into the only armchair he had. He watched Kit look to the 
window, wide open, the windowsill slightly damp from the drizzly 
rain. Blake was about to speak, when Kit got there first, his words 
softer than usual. 


“We should close the window,” 
“Why?” 
“Because | don’t want to jump out of it.” 


Blake approached the window, and closed it with a gentle thump. 
After a hesitant moment, he retrieved the key hanging nearby, and 
locked the window. The key ended up in his pocket. Kit hadn't 


noticed, still staring at the spot where there had once been a Kit- 
sized gap, an empty space calling for him to crawl onto the 
windowsill and... Blake couldn't think on it any further. 


"I've got to go," he said instead. Kit turned his head, watched 
something on the floor, then looked up at Blake. 


"Of course," he said, simply. Blake always had to go. Blake had a 
job. Blake had a wife. Blake had a baby on the way. Above all, Blake 
had a life. 


"Have you... got food in?" Blake asked absently, concentrating far 
more on retrieving his car keys from his jacket pocket. 


"Sure," Kit muttered, with equal absence and enthusiasm. Another 
pattern. A question, and a lie in response. Their relationship was 
built on intense dependence, followed by simple lies. 


".,.Okay then." Blake said, with a tone of finality. "Well. You have my 
number. Uh. ...I'll tell Amber you said hi." 


Of course, the woman he had only met two times, before the child 
was a twinkle in Blake's eye. The woman that Kit couldn't care less 
about, when he had someone like the Duvet Queen visit him. 


"Sure. Okay. 'Bye." Kit said, not bothering to stand. Blake nodded 
once, then walked the short distance to the front door, letting himself 
out. The door shut behind him with an echoing thud, a final curtain 
drop on their relationship. 


Brotherhood. It was rarely an easy ride. Kit closed his eyes as he felt 
a cloned kitten climb onto his lap. Time to try and sleep. Time to try 
and escape all this. 


« Kit's Bloomin’ Adventure | Hub | The Duvet Queen» 


One kit and an (Anomalous) Baby Pt. 1 


When the knock on the door came, Kit had just put the finishing 
touches on his Christmas tree. It wasn't a typical Christmas tree — 
instead, it had been carefully painted on the wall of his living room, 
with the cream paint already purchased to banish the festive item 
come New Year's. The star on top, the final piece, gently trailed 
glitter, and Kit rubbed a weary, paint-smeared hand across his face, 
which promptly became a splattered mask of greens, reds, and gold. 


He stretched out, grunting in satisfaction as his back cracked. He 
wasn't expecting anyone and Kit wasn't exactly swimming in visitors 
these days, so he decided it was probably a mistake, especially this 
late in the afternoon. So, he took a leisurely walk to the front door, 
opening it to find - 


Nobody. 
Huh. 


He was about to turn back and close the door when his eyes fixed 
on the floor. A cardboard box, and inside — a baby. 


He quickly looked up and around himself to see if this was some sort 
of prank. The baby in the box gurgled and stared at him. It wasn't 
teeny-tiny like the kind he had seen held in slings by parents who 
cooed and rocked them, but it wasn't so big that it had teeth yet — 
not that Kit could see, and he wasn't about to stick a finger in there 
to check. Its face was still chubby and much more baby than toddler, 
with a head of short, dark hair that seem mismatched against its 
ocean-coloured eyes. 


Finding no-one in sight, the hallway quiet, he bent down to find a 
scrap of paper safety-pinned onto the baby's purple sleep suit. He 
freed the note, careful not to hurt the baby, who was contentedly 
watching this new human with a look of distant amusement. Kit 
smoothed out the paper, then studied it carefully. 


The note, in neat, festive red and green script, read -