Per 
Dr. Reingold sat at the interview desk, awaiting the security team to retrieve SCP-110-01 for questioning. Rather than the zen-like focus he usually corralled before interviewing skips, he felt his heart jump in a light flutter, like it had been sprinkled with a pinch of pixie dust. It was strange, this sensation, almost like a child on Christmas Eve, eagerly awaiting presents the next morning. It was almost…giddy.
I can’t believe it, he thought. This is really something. I’m about to interview one of the most famous people on—
Reingold stopped himself. He breathed deeply through his nostrils and cleared his mind, probing for any possible cognitohazards. He had been trained in detecting these, but identifying mind-affecting anomalous forces without special equipment was a tricky business, even to those more gifted than he.
“You okay, Reingold?” came a voice in his earpiece. Dr. Ericsson was observing the interview room through a tiny security camera lodged in the upper corner of the room.
“Yeah,” Reingold answered. “Just prepping.” He’d detected nothing. Odd; feeling much in the way of emotion had become foreign to him. The son of a both a former Foundation doctor and site administrator, Reingold had inherited his parents’ cold unflappability in the face of anomalous entities. This sensation might be worth noting. He’d have to be careful.
The skip was not a he, Reingold reminded himself, as he did like clockwork prior to interviewing a humanoid SCP. It was an it. It might very well be nothing like what Reingold envisioned. It could be warped, conniving, dangerous, possessing anomalous properties it could reveal at any time.
Reingold looked at the thick chain welded to the middle of the solid metal desk, itself attached to the floor. That chain would be used to harness a potentially dangerous entity, not a man. As always, it was best to remain objective and wary.
Suddenly, the security doors buzzed, then slid open. Handcuffed between two armed security guards, wearing standard humanoid skip uniform, stood SCP-110-01. Despite Reingold’s steeled countenance, he was stunned by what he saw: a smallish, thin man, perhaps in his early sixties—thinning gray hair, a broad mustache, and that all-too-familiar rectangular head, brown eyes set beneath sharp, defined eyebrows, and a long nose. He was both classy, stern businessman and congenial grandpa; a man incarnate from a fifties’ mogul magazine who could be found leisurely reclining in the living room in a short-sleeved button up, smoking a pipe with a glass of scotch. The most jarring of all was seeing this man—thing—in typical humanoid skip uniform instead of a sophisticated grey suit.
The heavy security doors clanged shut as the guards led the humanoid to its seat, then attached its handcuffs to the chain. SCP-110-01 made no resistance, complying with the modest regality of a humble king, as if going along with this charade of imprisonment and procedure for its own amusement. The guards then stationed themselves by the door, weapons drawn as per protocol.
SCP-110-01 tilted his—no, its—head expectantly. “Hello there,” it said pleasantly. “So, what can I do for you?”
Reingold suddenly realized his breath had caught in his chest. The friendly Western lilt in its voice, the slight, occasional gravel—it was exactly as he’d heard it as a kid, all those times watching reruns of the man’s famous black-and-white T.V. show hosted on ABC, all those years ago. No, not of it, the skip, but him, the actual man. Reingold took a deep breath, then shook his head. “Forgive me,” he told the skip. “It’s just…a little off-putting.”
“Oh, it’s quite all right,” SCP-110-01 replied. “I get that a lot around here. But, let’s get down to business.“
Reingold drew his laptop and keyboard closer. “Yes,” he muttered. Oh, but there were so many questions he had! He was dying to break from his assigned list of interview questions and probe this man’s brain: first to find what similarities there were between him and what Reingold knew of his dimension’s version of him, and then to inquire about…goodness, everything. All of it. Reingold wanted to know everything.
This itself was concerning. This strange sense of enthusiasm bubbling inside his chest was getting more difficult to control. One would never know by looking at Reingold’s unruffled expression of objectivity and cold, professional focus. He glanced over his list of interview questions and pushed the voice recorder, attached with a cord to his computer, toward the center of the table. He turned on the recorder, then clicked “record” on his computer.
“And I know you can’t break protocol, but still, call me Walt, if you wish,” offered the man.
Reingold’s stomach leapt. Not a man. A skip. Keeping the distinction was proving difficult. He considered sending a coded message to Ericsson, asking him to monitor for possible cognitohazards, but pride decided against it. He took a brief second to mentally regroup, then began the interview.
“Please speak clearly toward the microphone,” he said. “You might have heard some of these questions before, but please answer them regardless.”
“Right,” replied the skip.
“All right. SCP one ten dash one,” Reingold began, “please tell me your full name, current age and perceived occupation.”
“Walter Elias Disney,” SCP-110-01 answered. “One hundred nineteen years old, and I am — still am,” he added with a sharp look, “founder and producer for Walt Disney Animation Studio, founder of Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom, as well as executive mayor of the city of EPCOT in Florida.”
The skip‘s answer grounded Reingold’s nerves. Hearing a Walt Disney lookalike proclaim he was over a century old while still looking like a middle-aged grandpa was a bit more the brand of strange Reingold was accustomed to.
The skip wasn’t finished. “I am also an animator, voice actor, director of animation and, thanks to you lot, sober,” it added with a wink.
A corner of Reingold’s mouth cracked a tiny smile. “And why do you think you’re here?” he continued.
The skip who called itself Walt sighed heavily. “Well, as I’ve said before,” it said, its mood suddenly gloomy and agitated, “I’m here because of…what happened at EPCOT.”
“Can you elaborate?”
SCP-110-01 let out another, louder grunt-sigh. “God-dammit, are you going to make me say it again?” it suddenly demanded, deeply pained. “Look, I’ve explained it to your people about five dozen times, can’t you just read the reports and be done with it, I don’t know anymore than you do, my story hasn’t changed, it won’t ever change, can I ever get out of this God-forsaken hole, or at least have a drink?” it exclaimed in a long, run-on sentence.
Reingold gave a mechanical nod of trained, manufactured commiseration. “I can see this is frustrating, SCP one ten dash one. We’re asking you these questions again, because sometimes little details might surface that can help us get a fuller picture of what happened. We’re trying to help you.”
“The hell you are,” the skip sulked. “You mean to torture me. I’m already plenty tortured by what happened. If this were some kind of punishment, a legal incarceration, that’s one thing. That I understand. But I don’t think it is. You all look at me like I’m some kind of lab rat.”
“Lower your tone,” growled a security guard from behind the Disney doppelgänger.
The skip sighed and put its face in its hand, covering its eyes. “I suppose I deserve it,” he mumbled. “I just…God, I just wanted to help people.”
“Well, you were messing around with anomalies, for one thing,” Reingold heard himself say, a bit sternly. He tried softening his tone; no need to stir up an already agitated anomaly. “You were playing around with forces too big to handle. Ones you didn’t properly understand. Some of the anomalies we found are not meant to be used the way your people were. Forgive me for saying so, but you got too big for your britches, sir—er, SCP-one-ten-zero-one.”
The skip was rubbing its head, as though a headache were coming on. This was nothing like the clever, calm and ever-optimistic Uncle Walt from the T.V. show. Hunched over the table, almost hiding behind it hand, it looked like a defeated, world-worn old man.
After a short, unpleasant pause, Reingold looked at the computer for his next question. “You realize you are not, in fact, Walt Disney from this dimension, correct? That ours has been deceased since nineteen sixty-six?”
“That’s what you crazy people keep telling me,” the skip replied. “With all your damn gaslighting, I don’t know anymore.”
“Can you tell us how you’ve managed to live as long as you claim, yet still appear much younger than your stated age?”
“Fountain of Youth,” it answered bluntly. “You folks know so much about anomalous…eh, whatchamacallits, you ought to know about that.”
A red flag popped up in Reingold’s brain. “A fountain of youth?” he asked, feigning innocent surprise. “Is that so? Tell me more about it. How did you find it?”
“I know people. The same ones you do, I reckon.”
“Club 33?”
“I had a couple close confidants there,” the skip explained. “They knew people in Russia who would get it for me. I‘d just finished negotiations to purchase five thousand gallons of spring water and bring it back here, to try and duplicate its properties back at EPCOT. Before everything,” he ended, grimacing.
“Holy shit,” Ericsson whispered in Reingold’s ear. Reingold glanced at the tiny monitor camera, hidden in the corner to the right of the security doors; he likely met Ericsson’s gaze as Ericsson, too, stared into the interview room from the observation room down the hall.
“Carol,” Ericsson’s voice barked at his invisible assistant. “Get a team to search the research facility and water treatment plant at site SCP-110. And while you’re at it, order a surprise review for containment procedures for 006. Just to be safe. Don’t push, Reingold, it’s liable to clam up. Continue for now.”
Reingold returned his gaze to the skip. “Can you tell us where you’re from?”
“Born in Kansas City, Missouri,” it replied tiredly. “United States, Planet Earth, third planet from the sun in the Milky Way.” There was a tinge of bitter sarcasm toward the end.
“Is it true you have no recollection of how you seemingly transported yourself and the city of EPCOT across dimensions?”
“Well, I remember something happened,” came the terse reply. “How, I haven’t the faintest idea. Some side effect of the core reactor malfunctioning, I suppose.”
“Please describe the nature of SCP one ten, as well as how and why you founded it.”
The skip continued rubbing his head and eyes. “It was a city,” he answered bluntly. “Was a city. It’s a pile of rubble now. And five point four trillion dollars down the drain.” He lifted his cuffed hands helplessly, then let them fall to the table.
Reingold decided trying a more conversational approach. “It’s hardly rubble,” he said. “It’s incredible. I went for a full tour just a couple days ago. Absolutely amazing. Who all designed it?”
Walt miserably lifted his tired hands from the table onto his lap. “Me, initially. As it grew, we got more people involved, naturally. It was never meant to be finished.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, it was meant to grow and adapt. A city is like an evolving organism; it’s made up of moving parts, and as parts of the city grow, other parts have to adapt. It might grow new parts to better help keep it all together. New technologies must be introduced to improve quality of life, education, health care, environmental protection, all these sorts of things. Our technologies were meant to be shared with others, so as to propagate and evolve, helping other communities thrive in harmony as we did. EPCOT was meant to be an ever-evolving, ever-growing blueprint of the future.”
Even in his sour state, hearing him speak captivated Reingold. Disney’s words sounded so wise in their simplicity. Anomalous or not, something in this man oozed a sort of magic.
“Tell me about these technologies,” Reingold pressed. He leaned forward a bit, allowing a foreign sense of pent, boyish excitement to creep in with measured precision, to promote a more conversational and informal discussion. “I know you’ve liked keeping your secrets close to your chest, but I’m just curious as to what you all came up with. What worked? What needed to change? How did you adapt over time?”
“Son, I know what you’re trying to do,” Walt said dourly. “You’re trying to put me at ease and get me to start gushing like I sometimes do when I’m giddy. But frankly, I don’t think I owe you or your cardboard cohorts a god-damned explanation, not do I think it even matters. You’re seen it yourselves. Absolute failure. Thousands have—have—well, you know—and I’m held responsible. I’m as guilty as Hitler, or Stalin, or Sadam Hussein, or Bin Ladin. If I were to tell you everything that went into EPCOT, you’re liable to try it again yourselves, try to fix what I did wrong. And as you yourself said, messing about with anomalous artifacts and entities is nothing more than an exercise in folly. A recipe for unmitigated disaster.”
“I can assure you, we know that better than anyone,” replied Reingold. “You’ve seen your containment wing, right?”
Walt nodded his head to the side. “What little I’ve seen, yes.”
“We’re about containing anomalies, not using them. The last thing we would do is try to recreate EPCOT.”
“The fuck are you doing, Reingold?” shouted Ericson’s voice, making the researcher jump. “Don’t go making it promises! Just ask the questions!”
Reingold closed his eyes. Ah, shit. Unbelievable. One of the cardinal rules of interviewing skips was to never, ever make them promises. Bad things tended to happen if they found out a promise, intentional or otherwise, wasn’t kept. Reingold knew better than that, although he couldn’t imagine the Foundation actually trying to duplicate EPCOT. Then again, the Foundation was known for doing stranger things. Who knew what the Foundation could possibly resurrect EPCOT for. Perhaps it would make for a good Thaumiel containment site, or be partially revived for experimentation. Regardless, he knew he would definitely get reprimanded.
Shoving down the infraction upon his pride, Reingold decided to drop the conversational approach and looked again at the monitor. From the corner of his eye, he saw Walt eyeing him shrewdly.
“Anyway,” Reingold began.
“Thank you,” Walt said softly. He smiled a little.
“For?”
“Your honesty. I have to say, in a place like this, it’s altogether refreshing to finally meet a real human being.”
Walt, it seemed, had taken the promise to heart. Reingold knew he should have felt alarm. Instead, he felt a warm, growing sense of…something. It didn’t fit the situation, but there it was anyway.
“Cognitohazard detected,” Ericsson said, with controlled urgency. “You feel it, Reingold?”
At last, Reingold did. He was lowering his guard, but he didn’t care. He felt Joy. Mirth. Exuberance. It bubbled and frothed like a magic potion from deep in his soul. Fifty years of cold, dispassionate, unfeeling, hostile reality lifted from his shoulders. He felt that if he would spread his arms like wings, he could fly. How could something this organic, this natural to children across the world, be a cognitohazard?
“Isn’t it wonderful?” he heard Walt whisper. “This is how it was meant to be. This is how it could be! We were put on this earth to feel joy, joy, joy!”
I wish I could always feel like this, Reingold felt. Forever and ever. He closed his eyes and half-imagined he was floating off the ground.
“Gah, dammit,” moaned Ericsson’s voice distantly in Reingold’s ear, nearly drowned out by the sensation of buoyancy. “We’re ending the interview. Reingold, you still with us?”
The last fragment of the real Dr. Reingold broke through the onslaught of forceful excitement possessing his brain. “Do not put down the entity,” he snickered. “Don’t forcibly remove me. He’s a control freak and doesn’t like being told ‘no.’ Try amnestinization?” The last word tittered from Reingold’s lips, like he had suggested something slightly naughty.
There was a brief pause on Ericsson’s side. “Approved. Remain, eh…seated, and prepare for amnestization. Security, please vacate the area.”
Reingold heard metal doors scrolled open.
He opened his eyes. Walt was hovering in front of him on his chair, grinning ear to ear, eyes sparkling with youthful zest. Reingold looked at the ground some seven feet below him, and laughed a deep belly laugh, like an exhilarated toddler being swung in circles by his father. He didn’t notice the two guards leave, or that the doors had close behind them.
“We’re getting our memories wiped,” he giggled. “They detected a cognitohazard.”
“A cogno-what?” Disney asked, amused. “That sounds silly. It‘s fun to be a bit silly, sometimes.”
Reingold let himself fully slip into joyful, reckless abandon. Perhaps this is what it felt like to be high. If so, he’d have to try it. “Fuck me, this is great,” he chuckled. “Er, ‘scuse me, Mr. Disney,” he blurted, as he caught himself swearing.
Disney shrugged it off with an unconcerned smile. “I know everyone still thinks I’m Uncle Walt,” he said, “but really, he’s just a character, you see. He’s not me. Far from it. See, me, I shit and fuck and suck and swear like any other human being on God’s green earth.”
Reingold stared at Walt for a second, then burst into wild laughter. Walt chuckled. “I wasn’t allowed to swear like that in front of the misses,” he admitted in confidence. “Feels kinda good, don’t it?” He grinned, like a child sniggering behind his parents’ backs.
Reingold grinned back at Walt. “Dammit, I wish I wasn’t about to forget this,” he said. He glanced up as what looked like three sprinklers lowered themselves a foot from the ceiling. Three valves clicked, and hissing gas began dispersing into the room.
“Lord, have mercy,” Walt muttered.
“Don’t worry, sir, it’s harmless.”
“Still, what say we bust out of here?” Walt asked with a roguish wink. “Want to?”
“Where would we go?”
“That, my friend, is only limited by your imagination.”
A thrill of almost painful ecstasy shot through Reingold like an atomic missile. He felt tears run down his face. “Okay,” he agreed “Um…Neverland? Is that real?”
“Do you want it to be?”
A mild brain fog, the hallmark beginnings of the amnestization, creeped into the corners of Reingold’s consciousness. Impulsivity seized him. It felt incredible. “Sure, why not.”
The next moment, Reingold saw only darkness. After a few blinks, his eyes detected the briefest, softest specks of light as they blinked in and out of existence. He looked to his right and saw Disney sitting placidly in his chair, floating in the twinkling nothingness.
“So, this is how you pictured it?” he asked.
“I…” Reingold looked around, trying to make sense of where he was. His eyes clung to the flickering lights, dimly surrounding them like stars running out of batteries. He shifted uneasily on his own chair. “I don’t know where we are.”
Walt point ahead of them, like a sea captain pointing to distant shores. ”Look,” he said, his voice hushed, conjuring feelings of impending, swashbuckling adventure. “Just there, straight ahead.”
Reingold looked where Walt pointed, but only saw more pathetic twinkling lights. “I don’t see anything,” he admitted.
“You don’t see it?” Walt admonished, and Reingold felt uncharacteristic shame heat up his ears. “Why, it’s right in front of you! There’s Polaris, straight ahead, and it’s just to the right of that.”
Reingold strained his eyes until he thought they might pop from his head, but still saw nothing. The idea of disappointing the man next to him made heartsick, so he decided to fib. “Oh, I see it now,” he said.
“No fibbing.” Walt frowned at Reingold, and Reingold’s insides shriveled. “Fibbing is imagination gone selfish. I thought you were an honest man.”
“I am!” Reingold cried, then thought about it. Calling himself honest after being caught in a fib was yet another lie. A strange prick of morality stuck his heart. “I usually am,” he said. Another prick, along with thoughts of rounded data numbers, approximations made during testing , white lies told to colleagues. “I try to be.” Prick; there were the blatant lies to D-class, the resume he’d forged and the superior he’d blackmailed to become a doctor to begin with, all those years ago. “I want to be.” Prick; there were the times he’d lied to his wife and pushed her away when he felt he was becoming too vulnerable and intimate. “I’ll try to be from now on.” At last came reprieve from the guilty pinpricks.
This seemed enough for Walt. He smiled and gave a firm, proud pat on Reingold’s back. “Good man,” he said.
In response, Reingold’s eyes watered. Earning Walt’s pride filled a strange hole in his heart he’d forgotten existed. He suddenly felt like a child, and that this man was the father he’d always wished for.
“How about we speed this up,” Walt offered. He reached forward and clasped his hand around a train whistle cord that hadn’t been there before, and gave two long, then one short, then another long tug. From deep in the darkness came the simultaneous serenade from a 5-chime whistle; two long, one short, then one long burst from the horn-like whistle, its clashing notes somehow pleasant to the ear. This was followed by the rhythmic, repetitive clang of the engine bell and low, rhythmic sounds of pulsing steam and churning wheels.
Gradually, a steam engine puffed and clanged toward them from the distant dark, growing in size until it was several hundred meters away. The train began to slow; it hissed, and the smokestack belched clouds of billowing fog as screeching brakes brought the mighty, black and red locomotive engine to a gradual halt. Once stopped, the shining bell chimed once more, then stopped.
Reingold stared in shock at the fizzing, steaming engine. He heard Walt laugh with delight. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he beamed. He walked through the empty darkness to the train, hopped up the side steps and swung himself into the engine room, a conductor’s hat suddenly on his head. He poked his head and chest through the open air window, brimming with excitement.
“All aboard!” he shouted jovially. “We’re off to Neverland in style!”
Reingold smiles. He stood up, walked across the void, and clambered up to the engine room next to Walt. The train slowly rotated in place, turning 180 degrees until it faced the way it came.
“Two long toots, and we’re off,” Walt said, gesturing toward the train whistle cord. With a deep breath, Reingold grasped the cord and pulled twice. The whistle sounded accordingly, the bell clanged, and the steam puffed and hissed as the train slowly chugged to life, whisking Reingold and Disney to the land where children never, ever grew up.
