Per 
"Listen, Imani, you're not getting it - this thing, it's very powerful, and does very impressive things." Dr. Gerald Gerald emphasised each 'very' with a light push on one of the Hot Wheels cars he had lined up along his desk. The cars were sent on unlikely paths through the mess of paperwork and stationary that surrounded him.
Dr. Imani Black frowned. It wasn't like Gerry to withhold information - even when he couldn't tell her something above her clearance level, he'd almost always just say so. Beyond that, she'd known him long enough to tell when he was stressed - the way he rolled his shoulders uncomfortably, or how his gaze flickered away whenever he wasn't focused on maintaining it. Hell, even his little cars were more skittish than usual as they motored their way to their inevitable dooms.
There had to be something more to this.
"Tell me if I'm following right," Imani said, "there's a thing-"
"An anomalous thing," said Gerry, catching the cars as they fell off the side of the desk and carefully placing them back in line with the others, "with anomalous effects."
"Such as?"
"Well, defying the known laws of physics, for one."
"Which ones?"
"Ones which science would dictate can't be defied," said Gerry gravely.
This was going fucking nowhere. Imani buried her head in her hands - was this some effect of the thing? Was it… reverse-memetic? Against-memetic? God, what was the word..
Oh, right, Counterconceptual! No, though - the Counterconceptual Department loved dealing with shit like this, they wouldn't brush it off on them. Why did she have to be assigned to the Department that was the butt of everyone's joke?
The Other Department had been founded way back - as far as she knew, it was as old as the Foundation itself, just as much a founding tentpole of the organisation as Physics or Temporal, the whip-smart men and women who could deal with the problems nobody else was qualified to deal with. They were even stationed in Site-19, the beating heart of the Foundation's efforts. Yet, as the decades had gone on and every damn sub-category of anomaly got their own department and funding, Other had shrunk to a mere footnote, getting fobbed off with the weird shit nobody wanted to deal with - sexy doorknobs, toilet ghosts, anomalous typefaces, whatever was confusing or incomprehensible or just annoying, all on their laps.
Even the Department's badge of honour, the Joker card, had been reduced this way. Once it had been a proud symbol of their uniqueness among departments - the card without a suit, the namesake of their anomalies' -J numberings. Now, it was abbreviated, appropriated, thrown in their face - in everyone else's eyes, they were the Joke Department.
Imani was snapped out of her brooding as her beeper did its thing and beeped. She glanced down at the pixellated red letters scrolling across the screen and smiled.
"HELLO BIG GUY. CAME FOR MEETING BUT TINY DOCTOR FLAP NO WORK - DR CARGOT"
The biggest benefit of working here, besides free access to the world's best weed, were the people, or in this case snails. She hopped out of her chair and opened the door of Gerry's office to reveal her favourite gastropod, Dr. Tess Cargot. She wouldn't say it in front of doctors Sluggo or Eyestalks, of course, but of everyone in the Tiny Thinkings Research Division, Tess was the only one who she'd probably hang out with outside of work.
"Apology for late, big - oh…" Tess squeaked, then paused and carefully readjusted her speaking apparatus with her radula. " Apology for late, big guy. Am slow. Only one foot."
"That's cool, Tess." Imani said, holding her hand out for her to crawl onto. "Gerry's driving me up the wall talking about it anyway. Maybe you can shed some insights?" At his desk, Dr. Gerald gave a happy wave and quickly packed away his toy cars. The Tiny Doctors were some of the few researchers that could be seriously injured by him stimming with them. Everyone else in the department had long ago accepted the fact they'd probably suffer a chipped tooth or fractured wrist from one of his tiny cars. As far as they could tell, any given person could only be party to one injury at Dr. Gerald's hands, and the old man was always very apologetic and happy to cover expenses. To many, it was almost considered a rite of passage in the department.
Imani brought Tess over to the desk and set her by its newest feature - a miniature swivel chair. It was one of only two in the site, the other in the middle of the round table int he department break room. While Imani knew the situation might outwardly look somewhat comical - a doddery old man chatting amicably with a punky young black woman and an actual snail in a lab coat - Imani knew a last-minute meeting like this meant something serious was going on. Tess, Imani and Gerry informally represented the respective Tiny, Medium and Big Deal strands of the department, and it was rare those strands needed to come together.
"Care to catch Tess up to speed?" Imani said as Gerry settled back into his chair, cars safely tucked away in his filing cabinet. "You may as well say it all to me again, I'm unbelievably lost." Tess turned her optical tentacles attentively toward Gerry, producing a tiny clipboard to take notes with.
"It's a rather pressing matter, I'm afraid. We've heard, via sources, that an anomalous object of alarming power is being held by the people who currently have it, a known liability to various Foundation goals, who intend to use it in ways which would impact proceedings." Gerry's face remained entirely . Tess' initial enthusiastic scribbling slowed down as she took in what the man was saying, or more importantly what he wasn't saying. "Obviously this situation can't be maintained for longer than it would be ok for it to be - in some amount of time, we'll need to recover the object, with care to take all precautions necessary for the effect that it creates, and contain it in a suitable containment chamber."
Tess adjusted her clipboard to sneakily show Imani that'd she'd drawn a big question mark on it. Big relative to her own size, of course - the whole clipboard was barely the size of Imani's fingernail. She restrained a laugh, but Gerry evidently caught on that they were skeptical and pulled his glasses off, rubbing the little red marks on the bridge of his nose.
"Guys, I know this is frustrating, but trust me when I say that I'm not omitting anything here. There's no compulsion to obfuscate, no counterconceptual effects that we can gather. These are the hard facts of the matter. There's a thing and it does stuff and we need to contain it before it does more of that stuff, or perhaps different but related stuff, in keeping with its abilities."
Tess had retracted one optical tentacle, and Imani could just make out her lower mouth tentacles wobbling pensively - she had figured something out. Imani knew better than to interrupt her while she was thinking, and gave her the space to puzzle out the right words.
"Am thinking, big guys… Many week ago, I meet big guy from MTF Omega-12, name LaFerrier. Bigger guy than you big guys, with gun and also had stubble. Him talked about special big guy them captured, name Streamliner. Is maybe like stream big guy?"
Imani pulled out her phone and searched the database for "the streamliner". Across from her, Gerry was doing the same at his ancient CRT monitor. SCP-4455 is a masculine humanoid entity with the ability to greatly condense and shorten narratives, often bypassing logical lines of causality… This didn't seem anything like what they were talking about.
Tess seemed to have pre-empted their confusion, having already thought through her justification. "Is not about thing stream big guy do," she emphasised, "is about way you thinking around thing. Trust me, big guys, am professor of tiny thinks."
This was true. Tess had earned her in-house doctorate just months after Imani herself, and her thesis, as far as she'd been able to tell through Tess' curious way of speaking, had been concerned with a new methodology for tackling abstract concepts via what she called 'hopscotches'. It was all about breaking down large ideas into smaller and smaller component pieces until they couldn't be broken down further - the 'atoms of think'. Then it was a matter of building upon this methodology to recognise strings of atomic concepts algorithmically, and use those to tackle things from new perspectives. It was all beyond Imani, who'd studied the sociological effects of constant exposure to the bizarre, and the harmful effects of warped perspectives when the supernatural became mundane, but she was sure it was how Tess had so quickly jumped to this weird way of explaining things.
"Stream big guy, him power not about skipping happenings. It about what happen happen." That… hmm. It was obvious that the Streamliner's power had some weirdness going on with it. Like Tess was saying, it wasn't skipping over events entirely, there was no temporal effect going on - it was simply that the most accurate and detailed way to describe his escapes was… 'He escaped'. Similarly, it wasn't that information about this thing was being was being suppressed, it was just that the best description of its anomalous abilities was 'anomalous abilities'.
This still hurt her head to think about, but she was getting there. Maybe.
"Would it help," she said, careful to phrase her question correctly, "if we didn't talk about how to get the object, or where it is? What if you simply told us where we're going and what we'll be doing, without talking about the thing which has certain abilities."
The look on Gerry's face (and Tess' tentacles) told her everything she needed to know. He had a gleam in his eyes, a sort she'd only seen a few times before. The last time was when the canteen had started stocking pork scratchings, and the time before that was when someone had bought him Heelies for his birthday. Both times had been similarly catastrophic for the site's infrastructure.
"Finally," he said, pulling a thick folder from a drawer in his desk, "the right questions."
Imani shared a glance with Tess - they'd talked several times about Gerry's theatrical side. Imani gave her a little shrug, and they turned their attention back to him as he continued. pulled from the folder what she identified as the timetable for the site's local train station. It had a number of times highlighted, with little scribbles in the margins.
"What do you guys know," he asked, leaning in for dramatic effect, "about the Hype Train?"
Oh. Oh, fuck yes. Imani's eyes widened as she realised what was going on.
They were going to be train robbers.
Darkblade had just watched the No Man's Sky trailer on Dr Gerald's phone for like the fourth time and he was psyched to play it when it came out.
"I have no need for silly games," he said, his eyes glinting as they caught a light that simply wasn't present given the dark and cloudy conditions, "but this, my friends, this is an experience."
"You've mentioned, yes." muttered Imani from behind him, popping the collar of her jacket up to ward off the cold.
Darkblade didn't pay the snark much heed, continuing to step through his practice sword swings. Not that he needed them - Darkblade was one of their best field operatives, proving the worth of the Humanoid Anomalies Department's employment drive twice over. Not that he'd come from Humanoid Anomalies, of course - no, that would be far too easy. He'd started out there, before they'd fobbed him off on Compulsives, then Compulsives had split into Benign and Aggressive branches and they'd both refused to take him. Imani didn't know how t was Fred, working for some department called Pataphysics, who'd eventually decided he didn't want to deal with Darkblade and had him transferred to Other.
Well hey, no harm no foul. Darkblade was charming, polite, stupidly good with that sword of his and somehow managed to be a weeb without any of the associated body odour. everyone in Other was in pretty firm agreement that they were glad to have him. If nothing else, it gave them someone else to talk about Junji Ito with.
Tess bumped Imani's collarbone with an optical tentacle happily. Looking down to her chest, she could see her friend's excited wiggling. Right, this was her first outing as a department head, after Dr. M'Lusk had stepped down.
"You nervous, Tess?" she asked, smiling right back.
" Sorry for goo on boobie, big guy," she said, "Gerry say train arrive soon, right? Tiny watch no very accurate, unfortunate."
A look at her own watch confirmed Tess was right. Imani turned to Gerry and made a motion around her ears to indicate he should throw his headphones on. He took a second to snap out of his daze, chewing nervously on the hem of his jumper's sleeve.
[Something]
The train arrived in a blink - no flash of light, no fanfare. Conspicuously missing, in fact, was the whomp of air displacing from a teleport, the sonic boom or wave of wind one would associate with it arriving at near-lightspeed. Before Imani had time to consider it had simply been sitting there cloaked while they'd been talking, the doors slid open. The sound they made could only be described, to Imani's ears, as Star Trek.
Darkblade was the first of them to walk toward the train, quietly sheathing his weapon as he stepped aboard.
"You guys coming?" He called, holding the door open. He was teasing, but it was a gentle tease. Imani nodded and took Gordon's hand. They hopped aboard just as the doors closed.
