"Gordon? Gordon, are you alright?"

Gordon's eyes snapped open and he jumped up, toppling out of the chair he'd been sleeping in. His surroundings were unfamiliar. Some sort of office building. Oh, shit, the Office? He couldn't see Jim or Pam, so probably not. Who was here? Two women, one man. He could take them, easy. Where was Kelly? Dead, Kelly was dead.

He needed to move fast.

He sprinted for the door. A young woman with pink streaks in her hair stepped in front of him, coiled to attack. He tried to swing a punch, but she ducked under it and rammed her shoulder into his gut, then pushed herself up under his armpit and twisted with a vice grip on his sleeve, using his momentum to throw him over her back. He slammed down hard into the wood floor, and she hopped on top of him.

"Gordon! Gordon! It's me." She was glaring down at him, her knee pressing into his throat. Who the fuck? He blinked. He'd seen those eyes. Piercing blue. It was-

"Princess Peach?"

"What?!"

"Princess Peach! Jesus, am I back to normal? Fucking crossover limbo again?" The girl climbed off him, something like pity crossing her face. Or disgust? "What is this, a save quest? If Bowser comes through that wall right now, I swear to fuck I'll actually come save you this time, alright?" He sat up, almost pleading. "I'll save you and we'll have fucking tea and crumpets and it'll be-"

"Gordon! It's me, Samantha! We've been working together for a month?" She growled, then showed him her Foundation security clearance. MTF-ι-0-2. Barker.

"Oh." Gordon took a second to process, sniffed, then clambered up and dusted himself off. "Right, yeah. You. Little Miss Chameleon."

Samantha frowned. "Just call me Hogwash, ok? That's the codename we settled on between stories."

"Yeah, no, that's bollocks, it changes. You used to be Intro." He scratched at his beard. "You used to be lots of things."

"Right now you're delaying the story." Gordon turned to the speaker, one of the other people in the room. Obviously Penelope, now he looked properly. And this place was obviously just another Foundation meeting room. "We're trying to keep this going at a steady clip, and you're slowing us down with whatever this is." Penelope squinted suspiciously. "You haven't been in another story, have you?"

Tough question. "I don't think so?" he said, poking a finger toward Samantha "Barker is different now, but it still feels the same."

Penelope chewed on her lip for a second before letting it go. "OK. As I was saying before your outburst, today is your first field mission. SCP-2559. This anomaly is extremely mysterious, with a dedicated site located in the Saha-"

"Hang on, time out," Gordon interrupted, making a T with his hands "we did that already."

Penelope frowned, but pulled out her phone and tapped at it for a second. "You are correct, it seems, although none of us remember it. We have extended ourselves into a data point already! That's marvelous! Excellent work!"

"We did literally nothing." Reggie muttered.

"I guess we'll move on to our next target, then! This one should be much easier. It's in this very facility."

"Why the fuck didn't we go there first?" Gordon growled.

"Order matters, Gordon. Surely you respect that." Penelope drew a second folder from her bag, much lighter than the first. "Here's what we have on it. SCP-2338. There seems to be some confusion about what the article even is. We're not exactly fixed in a time here."

"Sorry, what?" Barker Kelly Samantha leaned forward in her seat, concerned.

"We're… Ignore it, move on." Penelope rubbed her cheek, her expression taut. "We need to get on with the story. I… Overvoid? Requesting a jump-cut. Standard reward in it for you. We need to get on with this."

***

"Wow, that was intense." Reggie gasped, slumping against the inside of the cell door.

"What," said Gordon, leaning against the right wall, "our daring break-in to one of the highest-security Foundation sites, Site-19?"

"Yeah."

"Or," said Samantha, grinning as she got what Gordon was doing, " did you mean just now, our oh-so-close escape from detection by an unexpected group of armed guards?"

"Y-yeah, that too."

"So just generally the last hour or so of what we've been up to, the sort of interesting action stuff that's hard to write, but easy to let readers make up themselves, filling in the gaps?"

"Um."

Gordon punched Reggie in the arm "Don't worry about it man, we're just fucking around. Come on, yer woman should be just down the hallway."

"Ryoko Sato." Samantha interjected.

"Her, yeah."

Sato was finishing up a class when they knocked on her door, teaching linear algebra to a pair of psychic twins. She seemed a little nervous as she exited the classroom, tying her long hair back in a quick bun. With her hair out of the way, a long maroon scar could be seen across her neck. It had been expertly treated, but it was clear the original wound had been brutal, and the mark it left was still thick and ugly, marring her otherwise smooth skin.

Sato stuck her hand out stiffly toward the group, not meeting their eyes. After a second, Samantha shook it. Sato stared intently at Samantha's nose.

"Hi. What's this about? We haven't met before." Sato blurted out. "Are you new?"

"Gosh, right to the point. Uh, I'm Sam, these are…" She realised she was at a loss to describe her fellow MTF members. Oh, hi, we're living plot points and we're here to directly extract your story relevance. Thanks! "We're sort of new," Samantha said, before Gordon could cut in with some snarky line. "We're visiting from another section, looking for information on one of your contained anomalies?"

Sato nodded. Her gaze flickered slightly between their ID cards. "And you're coming to me specifically… 2338?"

"Uh, right. We know you're heavily involved, but we don't really know how? That might sound odd, but the department we're from…"

"It's ok, I understand we have dozens of secret departments." Sato smiled softly. "Could we, uh, take this somewhere a little more private? They're emotional memories for me, I'd prefer not to-"

"Of course, of course." Samantha motioned to put her hand on Sato's shoulder, but the woman cringed and leaned away from the contact. "Why don't we take this to your office?"

"That would be good." Sato briefly met Samantha's gaze, flashing a relieved smile. "We can get some lovely tea on the way."

***

"... and I guess that's it, that's all I know. Sun-Hee is still living symbiotically within Eomi. I visit her for lessons three times a week. Today is one, actually. I'll be seeing her in…" Sato looked down at her wristwatch, then bolted out of her seat. "The time! God, it really gets away from you. I need to go see her now." Sato poured the remainder of her cold tea into a thermos flask and threw it in her handbag as she headed into the corridor outside. She paused in the doorway, mulling something over. "Thank you for this, Sam. It… helped, in some way. Opening back up."

And then she was gone, her sneakers squeaking ever so slightly on the wooden floors as she hurried off to teach.

Samantha sunk back in her chair, letting out a long sigh "That was…"

"A bit grim?"

"Yeah. That."

"Cuter than the last one."

"Twenty-two children died, Gordon."

"Right, yeah, fair point."

They fidgeted in their seats.

"So," Reggie finally said, breaking the silence, "is that it? Head back to Pataphysics, report a job well done?"

Samantha and Gordon exchanged looks. They were both feeling it.

"There's something… incomplete here. There's a thread we're not following." Gordon twiddled with the end of his beard, thinking. "Maybe you're supposed to do something, Reggie. Or I am? Sam's the only one who's actually done anything so far."

"Right, yeah, and Void's done whatever he thinks he's done."

"Sure, yeah."

"Maybe we were supposed to-" Samantha coughed hard, her body juddering. She spluttered for a few seconds, then wiped her mouth. "Sorry. Um. A-hhmmm. Uh, maybe we were supposed to follow Sato? Go watch her with Sun-Hee, get some information that way?"

Gordon groaned, spinning in his office chair in frustration. "That's totally it, yeah. Storytelling basics, damn. How did we miss that?"

Samantha shrugged. "Emotions? Maybe we were just distracted?" She chewed her lip. "Come on, if we head now, we'll still catch a decent chunk of it."

"How the hell are we supposed to know where to go?"

"Duh," said Samantha, "we ask politely."

***

It really was as simple as that. When they hadn't arrived out of nowhere in the middle of one of the Foundation's most secretive sites in the middle of the Sahara Desert, people didn't question the all-access keycard too much.

"Why the fuck are we even breaking into places?" Gordon asked, after their fifth encounter with very polite, friendly researchers happy to point them toward 2338's containment tank. "Seriously, does Penelope just get off on the idea of us in balaclavas?"

"I guess it's like a story thing?"

"Fucking story things"

"Like - yeah, fuck them - like if there was no conflict we'd be dropping more readers?" Samantha was speaking distractedly, counting door numbers.

"Wasn't the point of all this bullshit to protect the story from being deleted on the assumption it would be unreadable garbage anyway?"

"I guess, yeah. But I guess in another way, for our own sake, it's like- Oh, hey, here we are."

"It's like what?"

"We're here, we're at the containment tank"

"Oh, right. Yeah. The fucking- the place we're looking for. I remembered that."

They slipped into the door marked Observation Room, careful to shut it securely behind them and slipped into two creaky plastic seats across the room from a pair of researchers grabbing lunch who gave them dirty looks for the intrusion, but didn't bother them. Down in the cell, on a balcony built so Sato could be at eye level with Sun-Hee, an animated conversation was going on in sign, entirely soundless. The girl was suspended in the tank within the semi-translucent bell of an enormous jellyfish, which bobbed slightly in the water but otherwise was pretty much static.

"You getting anything, B- Sam?"

"What sort of anything?"

"Like, of what they're saying. You've gotta have done some ASL in college or whatever, right? You know what the wiggly fingers mean?"

"I.. have, yes. But that's not common, why would you assume-"

"You're a convenient plot device, Sam. You're built for this. You gotta get that in your head sooner or later."

Samantha frowned, but turned to observe the two in the pit. "Uh, something about stretching, tentacles. Backwards… hands? She's talking about the future… or the past, I'm not sure."

"Oh, shit, did you feel that? You did it, story is over."

Samantha cocked her head slightly. "Shit, yeah, I feel it too!" The couple in the opposite corner shushed them, then went back to their conversation.

Samantha and Gordon fell silent, watching transfixed as Sun-Hee begain to spin and twist within the jellyfish, a topsy-turvy dance full of childlike abandon and an odd degree of elegance. They got the sense of Sun-Hee moving with the jellyfish, her movements embodying them both, frantic and serene. The girl's multicoloured cape swirled behind her heavily, rainbow feathers falling off and forming a snowglobe flurry around her. On the balcony, Sato removed her shoes and began to dance alongside Sun-Hee, complementing her actions with graceful swirling movements. She let out a light laugh, and Sun-Hee stopped for a second to respond, miming a smile on her featureless face before returning to play.

"I told you this was cute." whispered Gordon "Nobody dancing in the other place."

"Shut up, Gordon."

Gordon nodded, and they turned back to the tank. Silent but together, they watched on.

THE END