pennylanethereisa

"Thirteen Down, 'Live Broadcast No-no…'" Dr. Zerda mumbled to himself, massive ears twitching pondering the eight white squares, reading T H _ F _ _ _ D. He took another sip of the earl grey (sweetened with the foundation's own non-anomalous honey) in the Site-77 break room.

"FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!" Agent Teal shrieked for his life, making Dr. Zerda leap up to attention.

"What?!"

"SCP SIX J DASH B LOOSE!" Those words were screamed with pure fear as he ran by the break room door. Thank god it wasn't an emergency.

"Oh! Oh, no they're allowed to breach ‘containment’, as it were." Zerda relaxed his shoulders, and took a breath. "They're going extinct, don't you know? Colony collapse disorder and all that. Same with bananas; quite tragic, I'd say."

"Would you fucking help me?"

"Are you allergic…?"

"If I was allergic to anomalous shit I wouldn’t have taken a job here! Now help me!"

"They're not anomalous, we don't even let them get near the anomalous flowers. Can you imagine if some of the ghastly flowers we have were to cross pollinate? It would be a nightmare!"

"Just tell me what to do to get them off my back!"

"Well, are you holding flowers?"

"…Fuck! Where do I put them?"

Dr. Zerda pondered this a moment, and then remembered.

"SCP-5765 is a safe containment for them… I think…"

"Thank fuck!"

"And stop saying the F word! There are anomalous children aroun… Oh, 'The F Word!'" Dr. Zedra wrote in the eight squares "THEFWORD".

"Goddammit, Will Shortz."

Agent Teal bounded down the hall, drifting as best as a person with legs could, briefly passing by Dr. Edmunsen, Junior Researcher El-Waylly and Dr. Ashby. AAaaaa my head fuck

“Listen, I know today is gonna be the day that we find the bees in 5765.” Edmundsen said, a subtly obsessive tone in his voice that Dr. Ashby had come to be familiar with. Dr. Ashby knew there was nothing in SCP-5765. It was a cognitoaffective chamber that had the strange property that you could tell anyone what was in 5765, no matter how impossible, and they would invariably believe you. In other words, if you told someone — for example, Dr. Edmunsen — that there was something — for example, bees — in 5765, they would not question the fact that there was that something in 5765, even if there was objectively no evidence for it.

“Let me get this straight, you’ve tried putting a D-class covered in pollen and sugar, dressed like a flower, and there was still no evidence of bees? That’s a puzzle…” Dr. El-Waylly said, stroking their chin.

“I mean, you’re lucky you’re just dealing with some bees for your first job and you’re not on Keter duty” Ashby added, sipping on some coffee.

“If the bees are this hard to find, they could easily be euclid, though!” Edmunsen interjected.

“Oh, that’s a good point!… Euclid is like, semi-dangerous, right?” El-Waylly said, looking at Ashby for guidance.

“Not necessarily. They’re just unpredictable, maybe needing to be checked up on every once a while.”

“Ah, yes. Makes sense.”

The swarm following Agent Teal passed by just out of earshot of the trio on their way to D-class containment. A good thing too, because Agent Teal had just arrived at SCP 5765, and was ready to rid himself of his terrifying annoyance. He lured the swarm onto the five dollar bouquet he bought from the florists, opened up the door, and with a graceful toss, he lured the insects in, and closed the door so they couldn’t escape. Hey, maybe they’d like the company. Who knows?

D-14417 didn’t expect to be drenched in honey, pollen, and sugar in a skin-tight bee-attracting suit when they first assigned him to the Foundation, but if there’s one thing he’s come to expect during his 3 years at the Foundation, it’s that you will not know anything about what to expect from the Foundation. At least he’d done this before, and knew the honey goes on the OUTSIDE of the suit, so you don’t get a second-rate, no third rate bikini wax trying to take it off.

“Good morning, Vince!” El-Waylly said, chipperly, excited to meet a D-Class for the first time.

“Don’t get too attached, uhh…” Vince said, eyeing El-Waylly up and down, a confused look coming across his face.

“Doc.” El-Waylly replied, a glee in their voice from his confusion.

“Don’t get too attached, Doc.” Vince said, dusting himself with the specially formulated bee-attracting pollen. He walked slowly behind Edmunsen and Ashby, while El-Waylly went at a nearly skipping pace down the hall to SCP-5765.

There was buzzing outside the chamber, which got El-Waylly and Edmunsen bubbling with hype, Vince terrified, and Ashby attributing it to a hallucination.

“Alright, June 14, 2022. Let’s open up that chamber.”

There’s something you should know about 5765, as the scientists open the chamber. If you’ve convinced yourself, over the years, that the cognitoaffective chamber you’ve been studying will contain nothing but thin air no matter when you look into it, you may accidentally fall prey to its devious effects. For example, if one day someone just happens to lure a swarm of bees in there for their own safety right before you start testing, you don’t necessarily consider that in the moment. The much more logical conclusion, in your mind, is that the law of object permanence has been shattered. In other words, you see a goddamn miracle.

“BEES!” shouted Edmunsen, with the glee of Captain Ahab stabbing Moby Dick through the heart.

“WHAT THE FUCK!?” shrieked Ashby, witnessing the closest thing to spontaneous generation anyone would see.

“OH GOD!” screamed Vince, seeing a swarm of potentially angry bees being attracted to his bee-attracting garb.

El-Waylly said nothing, but thought that this job was going to be insane if this was her first day, chasing everyone else, including the bees, down the hallway to see how this all went down.

Vince had never had a fear of bees, but he was damn close to getting one at this point. He still got a fight or flight response, and those shits were too small to fight.

Vince locked himself in one of the unisex bathrooms and practically tore the suit off him, threw it out so the bees could swarm it, and locked the door. How he’d get back to D-class in his underwear without anyone questioning him wasn’t important to him, but he’d done it before, and he could do it again.

Dr. Edmunsen, meanwhile, scribbled furiously every single note he could about the bees, having observed them for what he thought was the first time. El-Waylly stared at the little wonders in action, and Ashby ran to find the person who seemed to know the most about forest-y anomalies, Dr. Cassius Zedra.

“Cassius! Cassius!” Ashby screamed.

“What, what is it?!” Hoping it would be a real emergency this time.

“Bees in 5765!” Cassius then knew, it was too fucking early for this poppycock. It was Sunday. A more peaceful Sunday than usual. Two people have interrupted his crossword and he was just about done.

“…Let me get this straight, you found bees… in a chamber that houses bees?”

Ashby stuttered out the starts of a few different sentences, red in the face, before putting his head in his hands and groaning.

“By the way, does ‘Adam’s Needle’ mean anything to you? Last thing on my crossword and I just can’t get it.”

“It’s a yucca tree… I think…” Ashby responded, quivering and tense.

“Ah, yes, brilliant! Y-U-C-C-A.” He replied, filling in the blanks.

“The bees… escaped!”

“Why did you not lead off with that!?” Cassius yelled, sharing the frustration of Ashby, running out to see the swarm of… entirely normal-looking bees. He turned to Ashby. “What are these bees’ anomalous properties?”

“I don’t know, phasing in and out of existence?”

“Fascinating!” He said, too distracted by a new curiosity to be mad. He walked slowly up to the pollinating bees, Ashby following a bit more cautiously. “Do you have beehives for anomalous bees?”

“I… I don’t think so. How do you even put the bees in the beehive?”

“You find the queen, Ashby! With a smaller swarm like this, it should be quite simple.”

“Alright, the queen’s usually distinct, right?”

“Right.”

Ashby could swear he felt the pieces of his shattered brain rattling around in his head. At least fifty thoughts were rattling around his brain. It felt like the room had flooded and everyone had become fish except him. Maybe he just needed to learn how to swim.

“No queens here, it seems.”

“5765 might have… teleported them there by mistake? Either way, I think they’d be happier outside.” El-Waylly chimed in.

Edmunsen let out a heavy sigh and thought, holding a very pleased bee on his finger. “I guess you’re right. Bees belong outside. I just…”

“What?”

“Two years. Two years I’ve been looking for these damn things and here they are right in front of me. They’re… beautiful. I never noticed how pretty bees were.”

Cassius chuckled and nodded. “I know that feeling all too well.”

“I mean, I got my degree in entomology, that’s why I was assigned to 5765.” El-Waylly added. “No regrets.”

“W-we should be getting this outside.”

“Right.”

Edmunsen, Cassius, and El Waylly started carrying the bee-covered suit outside, as Ashby gave Vincent his clothes and led him back to containment.

“You know, nature photographers usually call this time of day ‘the golden hour’”

“I thought that was right after sunrise. Makes everything look golden and pretty.”

“I mean, everything’s very pretty right now.”

And, almost ceremoniously, they laid down the technicolor bee-coat and let the bees fly around the apiary,

“You think site-command will let us… chill a bit?”

“I assume so. We’re still studying the bees, are we not?” El-Waylly smiled, nodded and took out their clipboard, writing notes upon notes upon notes about the bees, engrossed in everything about them. Edmunsen carefully laid himself in the grass, just watching, writing every so often, while Cassius entertained himself by summoning the bees to his fingers and whispering praise at them.

After about an hour in the sun, El-Waylly realized they should probably move on to their next scheduled experiment with Edmunsen, and Cassius would have to get to work filing. They exchanged their polite “see-you-laters” and went on their way.

They had all felt a certain amount of magic that day — well, an amount of magic outside the usual anomalies. Anomalies, for all their oddness, were predictable. Maybe not in the moment, but they were still usually subject to their own set of laws. They had rules. SCP-5033 would only explode if it got alarmed. SCP-5523 would grow plants deers love for their families and their friends as a sacrifice. SCP-524 will eat literally anything, including himself. Unexpected beauty was few and far between, but every member of the trio could feel a little bit of it, when they swore in their hearts that they heard the tiniest, faintest buzzing behind SCP-5765’s reinforced iron chamber door.