#bleach si

[forestery-art]

i made a bleach self-insert but didnt stay into bleach long enough to draw anything else

[mixelation]

SODIUM HYPOCHLORITE

(part 3 here)

I was losing my goddamn mind.

Things just kept disappearing from the lab. Chemicals, tubes, beakers, antibodies– nothing was off-limits. One of my flasks of rat-derived nerve cells had disappeared.

Who would steal that? Who?

Since part of my job was to keep the lab well-stocked, I spent a lot of time kneeling in the storeroom and counting bags and boxes of things. I also got blamed whenever we ran out of things, which was happening quite a lot, because someone was stealing from us.

“It could be one of the undergrads,” one of my labmates said. “You should talk to them.”

It couldn’t be them, though, because they all disappeared for an entire month for exams and winter holidays, and every single 1.5ml tube disappeared from the lab overnight.

We used 1.5ml tubes for… basically everything. We had had thousands of them. I ran upstairs to another lab to borrow some, since we couldn’t wait for a new shipment.

“You haven’t noticed stuff disappearing, have you?” I asked fellow research assistant Alex, who’d joined this lab at around the same time I’d joined mine.

“Not really,” he said. “Although someone’s been leaving our freezers open.”

The freezers defrosting was a huge point of contention in the lab. One of his labmates came over to argue with him about it, so I took my tubes and left.

The rest of the lab disappeared for the week and a half or so around Christmas– all of them had family in other parts of the country. We worked with live animals, though, and someone had to come in and take care of them.

That left me alone in the lab, feeding fish and tending to other menial tasks. On my second day alone, I walked into the lab just in time to watch a bin of beakers float by. I froze. The bin dropped to the floor. Several of the beakers shattered.

I inched by way around the fallen bin, not taking my eyes off of it. There was no way that happened. It had fallen, or I’d imagined it, or… or…

There was nowhere it could have fallen from. It was just there, in the middle of an open space. There were bits of broken glasses scattered around and the plastic bin had cracked and sagged.

I started my computer and checked my email. I had no new messages because it was winter holidays and no one was working, so I checked the status on some orders I’d made to fill our mysteriously missing lab equipment. I spent twenty minutes scrolling through the different colors of nitrile gloves I could order, and spent some time googling to see if I could find the ones with aloe vera from a different supplier for a cheaper price.

When I’d run out of ways to waste time, I looked back over at the bin. It was still there.

I got up and went to go take care of the fish.

--

In the morning the bin was gone, and I was left wondering if I’d imagined the whole thing.

Then I realized one of our shelves of beakers was empty, and I nearly screamed from frustration.

I went and found Alex, who was also the only person in his lab. He was watching an American football game on his laptop.

“A ghost stole our beakers,” I said.

He snickered, saw my completely serious face, and sobered.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“It took our beakers and when I caught it it dropped them,” I said.

“Uh,” said Alex.

“I’m serious,” I insisted. I sounded hysterical. It was fine.

“Maybe you should go home early,” Alex said.

I went back downstairs and took pictures of the empty shelf from all possible angles. For evidence. Or. Something. Something.

--

Our samples had been washing off the slides we mounted them on, so day four found me sectioning frozen retinas and mounting them on different brands of slides to see what worked. It was a monotonous task and since I was alone, I was blasting Rihanna through the entire room.

There was a weird dragging noise outside. I paused the music, hunched alert over my samples. The dragging noise continued– a loud scraping noise that crawled through my skin. I cautiously tiptoed to the door and stuck my head out to the hallway.

The ice machine was in the hall. Someone had moved the ice machine, and it was still slowly creeping down the hall, wailing all the way.

I ogled as it slowly and haltingly moved towards me. That was. That was weird. That was the last thing I expected a ghost to steal.

I thought to video the mysterious moving ice machine, but I’d left my phone on the bench inside, still in the beaker I’d been using as a makeshift speaker.

The ice machine got closer, and I briefly saw a shadow behind it. It was round, with something like spindly limbs, but not entirely human. It occurred to me I very much did not want to deal with some type of ghost that was strong and weird enough to steal an ice machine.

I turned Rihanna back on and returned to sectioning.

Just as I was getting used to ignoring the horrid scraping outside, there was a sudden, violent scream, and then a lot of crashing. I stilled over my sectioning, a sweat bead rolling down my back as Rihanna crooned something completely contrary to the mood.

There was silence after that and it took me several hours to gain the nerve to wander outside again. The ice machine was abandoned in the hall, and broken glass trailed from the part of the lab that housed my desk.

Another shelf of beakers was missing.

--

In the morning, the ice machine was still in the hall, surrounded by a growing puddle of water. I picked my way over it and called plant operations to report some mild flooding.

“What’s it doing in the hall?” the woman on the other side of the line asked. “Why didn’t you clear the ice out first?”

“Oh, I dunno,” I said vaguely. “It wasn’t me.”

I hung up. Our lab was in an out-of-the-way building and no one was going to pass by and slip.

There were two things clear to me now: 1. There was some sort of egg-shaped ghost stealing our things, and 2. They needed a lot of beakers.

I googled ghosts. There was an unsurprising lack of scientific papers dedicated to them.

No matter, I was a scientist in a lab full of science equipment. I could do this.

I gathered every beaker in our lab and arranged them in neat lines of clusters across the floor. I then constructed rings around them: a ring of iron test tube clamps, another of lab-grade NaCl, a third of “instant ocean salt” from the fish facility. I even found a bottle of silver nitrate, although there was only enough to form a ring around a single beaker.

Then I made concentric circles: one cluster was ringed by both iron and NaCl, one cluster by both types of salt, and another by all three.

I loaded all the other beakers into a huge box that had once contained hundreds of petri dishes. If salt and iron didn’t work, I’d need more bait.

Also, the beakers belong to my lab, goddammit.

I dragged the box of beakers around with me all day, hauling them onto a cart so I could watch them while I fed fish and sterilized pipet tips. When I was done with my chores, I came back to discover a freezer open and all the samples and reagents it once contained gone.

“YOU FUCKS!” I screamed at the the freezer. “YOU FUCKERS! I’LL FUCKING GET YOU!”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the weird shadow again, round with skinny arms and legs. I grabbed the nearest object to me– a box of kim wipes someone had left on top of a centrifuge– and hurled it at the shadow.

The shadow giggled and danced off.

Livid, I lugged my giant box of beakers to my car and took them home with me.

--

The internet was unhelpful in banishing ghosts. Many sites were insistent I could get rid of one just by asking ti to leave. Other places wanted me to find my spiritual guide. A lot of people burned white sage.

Where was I supposed to get sage? Could I just use the stuff in my spice rack?

I couldn’t concentrate on anything. For dinner I angrily downed three cups of coffee and a handful of cheerios for dinner. I nearly snapped the needle on my insulin pen trying to inject while distracted.

Holy water. I had a bottle of holy water. It was in a bottle that originally contained drinking water, because I had not planned my trip to Lourdes, France very well, but it was still an entire half litre of holy water.

The ghost was going down.

--

I couldn’t sleep that night, so wrapped up in the nervous energy of preparing to destroy a filthy thieving ghost, and I ended up getting out of bed and driving to work at 5:30 in the morning.

It was therefore still dark when I arrived, and I fumbled with my keys a bit getting the door to the lab open. I pushed open the door, already plotting the most efficient way to obtain a squirt bottle and fill it with holy water.

There was a flash of pink from over the beakers still left out on the floor.

I paused in the doorway, one hand still on my keys and the other clutching my half-litre of holy water.

There was someone squatting over the beakers. This was not an ovular shadow, but a person-shaped white figure. It was transparent and fuzzy around the edges, with a but of vibrant pink at the top.

Did the… did the ghost have pink hair? What?

The ghost stood and kicked the beaker I’d ringed with silver nitrate. It crashed into the wall and shattered.

“Hey!” I protested. My beaker!

The ghost ignored me and stomped on another group of beakers, smashing them to dust.

“HEY!” I repeated, taking two steps toward it. “Those are mine!”

The ghost turned, ever so slightly, and I took those two steps right back towards the door. It had heard me. That was…

I had been gungho about destroying a ghost a minute earlier, but now that I had its attention, I was…

Well. I was shaking now.

“Oh,” said a voice which might have been coming from the ghost but sounded more like static from a radio two rooms away. “You can see me.”

It did not sound particularly impressed.  

I tried to think of something to say. “Those are my beakers,” I squeaked.

The ghost peered down at the glassware I’d scattered around the lab and toed one of the test tube clamps I’d set out. Then it put its foot fully down on the clamp, and the metal crunched.

That was…. upsetting.  

“Were you doing experiments on my experiments?” the ghost asked. He sounded bored, even as it flattened another clamp underfoot. I winced at the noise.

I didn’t say anything, so the ghost went on in a drawling voice, “It didn’t work, even if my experiments are idiots.”

His voice very clearly carried the tone of and so are you.

“Um,” I said. “Could you please not break those?”

I couldn’t make out the details of his face, but he turned more fully towards me and crushed another clamp, then he tapped a beaker lightly with his foot and said, “These don’t hold up under high pressure.” As if to demonstrate, he casually pulverized that one too. “What do you have that does?”

“Uh…” My mind had gone completely blank. I was talking to a ghost. A frighteningly strong ghost with pink hair. “I could google i–”

The ghost took a step toward me. Panic flooded my brain and I dived for the drawer at the end of my bench.

“These!” I yelped. I fumbled with the drawer and nearly dropped the tube I extracted from it. “We run this at one hundred thousand times gravity.”

I held it out to him, arm trembling, and he crossed to me in three lazy steps and took it.

“Hmm,” he said thoughtfully, turning it over in his hands. Then with the slightest twitch of his fingers, he shattered it. I had to remind myself to keep breathing, eyes glued to his hand. Pieces of whatever polymer had been engineered to withstand hundreds of thousands times the force of Earth’s gravity fell from his hand, which was suddenly and diizingly in focus.

“I suppose it’ll do,” he said eventually, the same way someone might tell their waiter, Yes, Pepsi’s fine. “How many do you have?”

I ended up loading all our tubes into a garbage bag for him, which he held away from his body as if it disgusted him. Then he disappeared.

It was still dark outside. I’d put my bottle of holy water down on the bench at some point, where it still sat, forgotten.

[zios-plotbun-farm]

Top is cover for my Bleach SI fanfic story. Bottom was just to see the original colors. Links for it below if interested. :) AO3: here FF.net: here