#case 4213

[planets-and-prose]

Masterlist

Becoming A Supernova

WIP Intro

Character Bios

Morgan

Sellia

Sergei

Dawn

Stories

The Escape: Morgan and Sellia Introduction

The Weight Of The World: Sergei’s escape

The Engineer: Sergei/Syemme Introduction

The AI: Dialogue Intro for Syemme

The Refugee: Anura Introduction

The Doctor And The Sunrise: Henry/Dawn Introduction

Finding A Light: Anura’s thoughts about Dawn

Empty Space: Sellia’s wounds never truly heal

Case 4213

WIP Intro

First Account

Normalcy

[planets-and-prose]

Case 4213-1: Interaction With SCP-004-14

Case 4213-1: Suspected Interaction with SCP-004-14. Note: Coincides with date of Case 3901: Perceived Disappearance of SCP-004-14. Code blue incident—no civilians seem to have any harm done and the only recollections are that of Subjects 9102 and 9103. This account is written by Subject 9102.

The first weird thing I remember is probably the one that happened…it would have been sometime in early July. I’m going to guess sometime between the fifth and the sixth; they blur together during night shifts. It was a fairly quiet night, which was really nice, since I think I’d just gotten over the initial shock about the tentacle. The first time I saw it, Rob, the janitor, had to make sure I didn’t scream bloody murder and tip the customers off that something weird was going on. Now, it feels weird that I was that scared of it—I mean, it’s never hurt anyone, it just likes to explore, but…that was years ago, and I was less indoctrinated to whatever went on in Tommy’s.

I’d also sort of learned that sometimes, time wasn’t what we thought it was. I’d only been there about a couple weeks, and I’d already experienced the…surreal sensation of time getting soft around the edges. It wasn’t…wrong, exactly, it just wasn’t right either. It tended to happen around three, I think I noted that before. But it was only around midnight when the guy came in with the box. Marion was the one who seated him, and I remember her pulling me aside and whispering, “Keep an eye on him, I’ve got a bad feeling.” It had only been a couple weeks, but I learned that Marion’s ‘bad feelings’ were pretty much gospel. Even now, I can’t remember one time where one of her ‘bad feelings’ didn’t lead to something happening that’s incomprehensible at best. So I kept a close eye on him, and just after I took his drink order, I noticed the box,

At first, I’d thought it was a briefcase, but when I saw it more clearly, I could tell that it wasn’t. For one, it was too big to be a briefcase, and it was more squarish than rectangular. And for another, it had a lock on it. It wasn’t one of the tiny combination locks that you’d expect to see on a briefcase, it was a big, ancient-looking thing that seemed like it would take a pretty big key. Definitely not the type of thing you’d bring to a diner. When I asked what he’d like to order, he seemed vacant. I got the sense that he was taking a long time to answer, but then something sprung back into place, and without me registering it, I’d written down his order and headed to the kitchen.

After what felt like an eternity and a moment all at once, I was bringing his food back to him, setting it down, and he stared ahead, catatonic. Then he was eating. Then, slowness. It was almost like someone couldn’t decide whether to fast-forward or slow down a movie scene—I didn’t feel like I was living it, but I must have been, since the order got taken. Marion said she didn’t notice any strangeness in what I was doing, but she did tell me that she knew something wasn’t right and had been keeping an eye on me. I swear, that old lady is the reason I’m here right now. Especially because of what happened after the guy left.

Weird time stuff aside, he ate, paid, and left. It all seemed fine. But when I went to bus the table and see if he’d left a tip, I noticed he left the box too. I mean, it was right in the middle of the table—how could he have LEFT it? It looked perfectly deliberate; it was sitting exactly in the table’s center, with a large key in front of it, pointing to the lock. It was begging me to open the box. I knew that it was.

This is where I can’t really tell what I actually remember and what Marion told me, so take it with a grain of salt, but apparently I had picked up the key and almost opened the box, but Marion smacked it out of my hand and pulled me to the back. “Absolutely not,” she hissed. “That box isn’t right, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I let you get us all killed or worse.” I can’t remember how I responded or anything—I probably just nodded. Marion wanted to call the manager and ask him how to respond to something like this, since we didn’t have any identifying information about the customer (he’d paid in cash). But when she went to go look at the box to get a basic description, it wasn’t there.

We’d both sworn it was there, we knew we saw it, but there was no way to prove it. We only had one security camera at the time and it was pointed at the hostess’ stand. Besides, we didn’t have access, and it was always grainy and cutting in and out. It was about as helpful as a fan in the Arctic on a good day, so it wasn’t like we could check that. But we both knew—or thought we knew—that it had been there. It was unsettling, strange. It put us on edge and gave us this impending sense that something had just gotten shifted around in the world, and now nothing was right.

But, as always, the graveyard shift went on.

[planets-and-prose]

Case 4231: Introduction By Subject 9102

I’m kind of surprised you’re even having me write this. Honestly, by the time I quit, I’d really forgotten that what went on there was out of the ordinary. I mean, for one, I really wasn’t sure that half of the things that happened even were weird—or at least, weird enough for you guys to care. A normal person would probably consider things like a lady trying to punch out a server over pancakes or random drunk people wandering in with their pets (heck, I even saw someone bring a chicken in and proceed to order chicken right in front of it) “weird.” And you get used to that, you know? Anyone who works the graveyard shift at a sketchy chain restaurant knows that strange things happen, and you take it in stride.

So I acclimated to all the weird things that happened. All my coworkers did, too. It was all part of my basic orientation--Wait tables, put in orders, pop into the bathroom at least at 2 am to see if the janitor needed help pushing the tentacle back into the middle stall’s toilet in the men’s room. Honestly, I think my idea to just stick an out of order sign on it so there was no chance of someone walking in on a green tentacle emerging from the pipes, suckers exploring the porcelain, was one of the better ones. Dealing with the tentacle was usually my job, since I was almost always one of the younger servers on duty and it could be pretty difficult to wrangle into the pipe in a timely manner. It was usually just me and Marion, and Marion was somewhere between 70 and 90. But Marion contributed in her own way. It was her idea to put the salt line underneath the carpet in front of the hostess’s stand. We learned to not think too much about why some people would get to where the salt line was, pause, and leave uncomfortably.

Both of us also learned not to look too close into the eyes of customers. Sometimes we saw bloodshot stoner eyes or the eyes of someone who’s out at three am to forget everything, sometimes we saw the heavily dilated pupils of someone who’s coked out beyond belief, sometimes we saw eyes that seem to be able to see everything and nothing all at once. We were never sure what the people with those eyes are. We just knew that they’re not quite human, and we didn’t bother questioning. A tip’s a tip, and I wanted to be able to go to college eventually. Honestly, sometimes the people of questionable humanity were less trouble than the humans were.

We were also used to the times when the place of our restaurant in reality was most tenuous. A little before three in the morning was when reality really started to bend. Customers would be confused at me appearing by their table, saying that I’d just gone to the kitchen to check on their order when I knew I’d been at the hostess stand for the past ten minutes. We’d have conversations that I swear would take hours but that would, in reality, take less than a second. The clocks were useless; it would be three, then three fifteen, than three ten, then three forty, then three twenty, then three ten again. I’d tried to record it on my phone, which always followed the same pattern, but somehow the video always turned itself off after a couple of minutes. Once I got a good video, but it corrupted. Maybe for the best.

Some days, I’d see Marion in a mirror’s reflection, turn around, and see nothing there. Marion said the same happened to her. The cook would swear up and down that he finished an order that didn’t appear. He tended to yell at us and blame us for losing track of it, but neither of us ever saw it. Maybe the janitor took it, maybe not. Either way, he learned to make extra, and we learned to keep a close eye on things around three, and to not look terribly closely at what skirted around the edges of our vision.

So…I don’t know, I’ll try my best to remember most of it. You really block food service work out of your brain, honestly. But I did think some of the stuff was pretty interesting, and I’m studying mythology now, so…hopefully I’ll be able to remember the stuff you care about.

[planets-and-prose]

WIP Intro: Case 4213

Listen, I don’t really know what to tell you. I worked there for like two years. You keep telling me you’re interested in things that are “abnormal,” but a lot of shit turns “normal” when you work the graveyard shift at a diner in a sketchy part of town. And I don’t know how much of what happened was me being tired out of my mind and running on coffee and desperation, and how much was actually interesting to you. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that if you’re tired and desperate, you’ll accept a lot as your reality. I think we all can tell you that.

Title: Case 4213

POV: First person limited 

Genre: Paranormal mystery (kind of?)

Synopsis: After the SCP Foundation (not my original entity) discovered that a local branch of a all-day-breakfast franchise manages to attract strange phenomena, they investigated and learned that a large number of SCP species had been there at one point or another. A series of interviews with a tired college student named Harper, who works the graveyard shift, tell exactly how much they dealt with, and how they learned to navigate the tumultuous world of food service when reality itself is coming apart. 

Basically, this is kind of a weird blend of fanfic and original fiction? Not all of this will be based on SCP. Some of it’s gonna be mythological, others will be folk stories. Harper is my OC, as are all other characters that will be seen, and if it’s from the SCP archive, it’ll be noted and the article will be linked.

[planets-and-prose]

May 2: Normalcy (Case 4213)

Hi all, here’s where I’m going to not tag people since there’ll be daily or almost daily short writings! The dates are going to be weird, since I used StoryADay to do structural stuff (like May 1 was the introduction to Case 4213), but here they are!

I honestly don't know why, but the times at work where I was the most scared were the quiet times, the alone times. I mean, sure, there were a lot of times where weird shit happened and we saw things that we probably shouldn't, but then at least things were definite. The weirdness was out in the open, where we could see it, where our minds couldn't make it larger than it was and our eyes couldn't play as many tricks on us. But when nothing was going on...things danced in the shadows, skirted around our minds. Sure, the customers looked normal, but that was the most terrifying thing of all. As we looked more and more, things seemed less and less the way they should be, and it just gnawed at me, wondering if what I was seeing was real, and what the truth really was. Sometimes I wonder if I wanted to know what the truth was.

Marion's intuition usually kept us safe, but it was nerve wracking, waiting for the time when it wouldn't. And sometimes, it wasn't the paranormal that we had to worry about the most. Sometimes it was the people high out of their minds, desperate to do anything for another hit. I hadn't been threatened with a gun or a knife, but Marion had; she, rightfully so, decided that she didn't get paid enough to die in a Tommy's, and gave them what they wanted. Occasionally she'll seat someone and I can see her hands shake. Those are the tables I sweep out from under her, and she doesn't complain. Sometimes it was the guys who think they're a little too smooth, think they're entitled to you. You smile and nod and don't speak up. And it's even worse at this diner. Because what if these dangerous people are dangerous in a way that we don't understand?

I kept waiting. Waiting for the day where a guy would snap and bits of my reality would break as I lost any ability to fight back.

So I don't know. I tended to prefer the nights where everything seemed strange. Because strangeness can be mapped, tracked, learned from. Nothingness is just...wrong. When you spend your days watching things unwind, the "normal" kind of gets ruined, since you're waiting for something to fall apart next. Now I'm still waiting for some of this to follow me. it hasn't yet, I'm burying this strange aspect of my past, but one day it might. The prospect is scaring me less and less, because I'm honestly just sick of this shit and have no more patience to dance around what the void, or the paranormal, or whatever the hell it is wants. It'll leave me alone, whether it wants to or not.

One way or another.

[planets-and-prose]

Day One of StoryADay

I wrote a thing! I’m gonna edit it before posting (even though that’s not technically what we’re supposed to do) but it’s from Case 4213. Have an excerpt:

Sometimes, time wasn’t what we thought it was. I’d only been there about a couple weeks, and I’d already experienced the…surreal sensation of time getting soft around the edges. It wasn’t…wrong, exactly, it just wasn’t right either. It tended to happen around three, I think I noted that before. But it was only around midnight when the guy came in with the box.

[planets-and-prose]

Find the word tag

I was tagged by the lovely ghosty @imaghostwriter​! I’m doing this for my three WIP’s including @beneath-our-masks​. I’ll try to use ones you haven’t seen.  Most of them will be Beneath Our Masks, which is by far my biggest WIP document.

Tension: “Sellia simply hummed in response, feeling tension melt from her shoulders. Her eyelids began to slip shut as she lost herself in the gentle movements of Ryna’s fingers.” (Becoming A Supernova) 

Smirk:“ When Riley saw the fear, they decided to stop messing around. Their smirk slipped away as they gently brought a hand up to cup Dakota's face.” (Beneath Our Masks)

Lick: Had to cheat on this one. “Kira let out a small sigh as she slumped back into the seat. The purple core flicked off, and Hakim released her hand, looking tired as well.” (Beneath Our Masks)

Dance: “The prospect is scaring me less and less, because I'm honestly just sick of this shit and have no more patience to dance around what the void, or the paranormal, or whatever the hell it is wants. It'll leave me alone, whether it wants to or not.” (Case 4213)

Search: “’I’ll do some research and see what legal measures we can take to protect you, but right now, we’ll just do what we can.’” (Beneath Our Masks)

Tagging @marlettwrites @n1ghtcrwler @blitz-spirit-and-foray and...I think that’s everyone who has done tag stuff before, but please do this if you wanna! Ask me for context, talk about my characters, etc!

[planets-and-prose]

StoryADay Day 2

Hi all, finals have killed me, so today’s story wasn’t so much a story as what I call a thought bubble from Harper, my Case 4213 OC. But here’s an excerpt nevertheless (more will be up once I can edit it, likely next week).

I tended to prefer the nights where everything seemed strange. Because strangeness can be mapped, tracked, learned from. Nothingness is just...wrong. When you spend your days watching things unwind, the "normal" kind of gets ruined, since you're waiting for something to fall apart next.