Special Agent Broderick sat in front of his computer, idly looking through closed case documents. Rat people in the subway? Turned out to be some group of perverts dressed in rat costumes. Mysterious artifact that killed all its owners? The damned thing was radioactive. A cult leader capable of real magic? A washed up stage magician and a humidifier filled with LSD. He would kill for once, just once, something he was sent out on to be a real anomaly. Considering he was in New York City, something genuinely strange was bound to pop up eventually.
He got the call about something weird going on at around two in the afternoon, just when he was reading about the moving statues that turned out to be a performance art group last summer. The call said that there was a girl with three eyes freaking out in Penn Station. It took him twenty minutes to get there from the field office.
When he finally got there, a member of security led him to the area where she was. As he got there, he observed the situation for a moment: the girl was backed into a corner and obviously frightened. She looked perfectly normal aside from the large third eye in her forehead. It was a dull red and seemed to lack both white and pupil, making it difficult to know where it was looking. A hat lay a few feet away from her on the ground, one that could have been used to cover the eye.
A security officer approached her; her forehead eye glowed red and the officer's hat and jacket ignited. He dropped his hat and tore off his jacket as Agent Broderick went to the head of security, after watching this display with astonishment and excitement: he would finally encounter something abnormal! He explained who he was, and was given permission to approach the girl. He did so, raising his arms above his head, one hand holding his badge open in her direction, the other empty.
As he walked into the perimeter he said, "Hello, I'm Nathan. I'm not here to hurt you; I'm here to help."
She backed further into the corner, looking away as if trying to keep him out of the field of her third eye's vision. He stopped a few feet from her.
"I want to get you out of here unharmed. Can you please tell me your name?" he asked calmly.
The girl looked at him from the corner of her normal left eye, her hand blocking her third eye from view.
"Megan," she said quietly in a shaky voice.
He picked up the hat that was on the ground and offered it to her "Was this yours?"
Megan nodded and reached out to grab it, then placed it on her head to cover her eye. Once this happened, he said "Why don't you come with me, I can take you somewhere you will be safe?"
Megan nodded and moved out of the corner. He cleared a path ahead of her through the crowd as they made their way to a hallway. When they were almost at the end of the hallway, she slumped and fell over, a small metal dart sticking out of her back. Down the hall stood a man in a suit, with one arm raising a badge and the other placing the weapon on the floor as Agent Broderick was reaching for his gun.
From the door he and Megan were heading to came two more men in suits wheeling a stretcher. As they approached they identified themselves as Agents Howard, Fine, and Howard of the Social Conformity Program, which he never heard of but they explained it to be a group made so that people like Megan can be helped to live normal lives, and more people knowing about it was a threat to people like Megan. They asked him to help them gently put her on the stretcher to get her to an ambulance they positioned at the exit they were using.
As they wheeled her to the exit, he tried to ask them questions, but kept being instructed to wait until they were in the ambulance. Once inside, he asked what was going to happen to her as one of the men attached a IV and a monitor to her arm, they were going to keep her under anesthesia until she was in a safe location to prevent her third eye from waking. As he asked more questions of the other two, finding out the Megan was from Maine and accidentally immolated her house a month ago before running away, the one who prepared the girl for transport filled a syringe and expelled the air before getting Agent Broderick's attention.
He was told he needed to receive a booster shot, in case there was some form of virus responsible for Megan's condition, after the shot he suddenly felt groggy, unable to keep his eyes open as he slumped over and heard them saying: "How much did you give him?" "Enough to make him forget everything after one or so." "This guy is good." "Why do you think we keep making sure his transfers get denied? This was the ninth scip he brought in alive this year."
It all faded to black.
- - -
As he awoke at his desk, Agent Broderick looked at his emails. A new one came in saying he had to log some girl in a weird costume who was throwing lit matches at people, claiming she was starting fires with her mind. As he wrote his report he considered sending in another request to be transferred out to another division. For some reason he kept getting denied, despite all his attempts to move to a job where there was more excitement.
Either way, today was just another boring day at the UIU.