READ THIS STORY TO [REDACTED] INSTANTLY

by darf

Chapter 6

Cozy Glow was behind her desk, holding a grey plastic thing that looked sort of like a remote-controller, but sideways and with only a few buttons. She was trading her attention between a monitor on the far end of her desk, and the two ponies, Lyra and Bonbon, that were in front of it.

"Status report," she said, then looked back at the monitor screen. She stuck out her tongue between her teeth and squinted a bit as she watched it, moving her hooves along with the controller between them. She grunted a few times, then smiled, set down the controller, and took a drink of a fizzy, sweet-smelling liquid sitting in a cup next to her. A large piece of pizza was beside it, with a single bite missing.

"We successfully located and contained the anomalous object," Bonbon said, reading from the top of her clipboard. "The object in question, designated SCP-XX69, appears to be a written volume of text that manifests anomalously as a combination of hazardous physical and psychological effects upon the reader." Bonbon double-checked her notes while biting her lower lip. "Primary interactions include a title page that reconfigures each time it is left without observation, and a body of text that does the same, rearranging so that it is never the same twice. In addition," Bonbon flipped to the next page of her clipboard and began to read with assistance from the topmost text, "the object manifests hazardous behaviour in direct proportion to... to..." Bonbon held her clipboard unsteadily in one hoof, her other jittering a little as it traced across the line on the page. "...in direction proportion to... the affected subject's, um... residual... [REDACTED] frustration..."

"Their what?"

Cozy Glow took a bite of pizza and chewed it noisily while picking up her controller. Her eyes were still glued to the monitor.

"Their, um, residual, [REDACTED] frustration..." Bonbon repeated nervously. She looked down at the clip-board, but the text remained unchanged.

"What does that mean exactly?" Cozy Glow asked.

"It means that if you read the book, the more [REDACTED] you are but the less you do about it, the more you'll get hurt." Lyra shrugged. It often seemed assignment write-ups used too many words to say what you could just blurt out in a sentence. That was just one of many issues with the foundation, if you were counting, and Lyra had a tally two meters long somewhere in her personal affairs drawer...

Cozy Glow set down her controller and pushed a button in the center, which seemed to halt the action of the monitor to her right. She leaned forward in her desk as she finally looked over the written report that had been laid in front of her by Bonbon at the start of the meeting. She studied the words on the first page twice over, then flipped to the second and read it too, half-stopping every sentence as though the text was in some made-up language, or suggesting something simply impossible, like finding a line at the grocery store with nopony in front of you.

"It says here the book's translated title is 'WHATEVER YOU DO HURRY UP'. Is that accurate?"

Bonbon shrugged, and looked to Lyra, who did the same. Bonbon mouthed the words 'you do this one', and though Lyra groaned, she took off her sunglasses and cleared her throat just the same.

"The title changes, like Bonbon—er, like Agent [REDACTED] was saying," Lyra said. She coughed loudly, and thumped a hoof against her chest. No matter how many times she tried, she never got used to pronouncing that stupid word. The brackets were especially troublesome. "That's just another version—"

"—manifestation," Bonbon added.

"—of its initial text. Whatever it says, the effect in an unprotected environment is to give anypony reading it an intense urge to check out the rest of the book. Which, as also described, will probably mess them up in some way or another..."

"And this thing is in containment already?" Cozy Glow asked. She picked up the report, studied it one more time, then set it back on the desk. She considered her controller again, then picked it up, pressed the center button, and turned back to face the end-of-desk monitor, which was emitting beeping sounds in concert with her button presses.

Bonbon nodded and tucked her clipboard away back inside her suit. "It is. Special Agent [REDACTED] and Thaumiel-class entity DSCRD-XXX1 were both of assistance with the containment procedures."

"Unnecessary assistance," Lyra said.

"Hmm?" Cozy Glow looked up briefly from her screen, but only for a few seconds before returning back to it.

"Nothing, Director."

"Very good." Beep boop. Cozy Glow's hooves blurred as they jumped between buttons and directional inputs. She narrowed her eyebrows and began to squint, once again sticking her tongue out between her teeth. "If there's nothing further, you're dismissed."

Lyra and Bonbon both nodded, bowed deep towards the desk, and saw themselves out, shutting the office's hulking, ornate door behind them with calculated silence, not letting it slam into place, but holding it just until the edge of the door peeked with the other, and then relaxing it gently as a baby dove.

Cozy Glow spent a few more minutes eye-locked on her screen before she threw her controller over her shoulder. It bounced off the wall and skittered across the carpet, seemingly unharmed, but scarred for life regardless.

"Shoot!" she said. "I was half a second from a PB!"²

Author's Note:

2: Cozy Glow's run was invalid for several reasons regardless, including segmented gameplay, pausing the timer during RTA recording, and modifying console hardware to cause the game to run three times faster than usual. - Ed.