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2008, The Museum

“Somewhere in the heart of the American South lies a building that exists in no directory, answers to no mortal higher authority, and will appear on no map. It is a place called The Museum, a place that acts as the headquarters of an organization known as P.R.I.M.E., a place that hides a collection of Objects that defy physics, history and sanity itself within its unmappable halls. 

“Tonight, you are going to get a glimpse into the daily lives of the men and women in the “Acquisitions and Documentation” Wing, where P.R.I.M.E. agents catalog the most dangerous of Objects. The coffee is bad, the paperwork is never-ending, but still they push on to help safeguard the thin line between your world and reality, in their own humble way.

“Welcome to an ordinary day at P.R.I.M.E.  

“Welcome to the place that calls strange home.

“Welcome to…The Southern Fringe.”

[Becky] has added [Alan], [Brent], [Rick], [Jimmy] and [Daniella] to the group chat “Acquisitions and Documentation!”

[Rick]: What’s this?

[Jimmy]: :-O

[Becky]: Hang on, too formal

[Becky] has changed the name of the group chat to “Catalogers!”

[Becky]: It’s soooooo sloooooow 😦

[Rick]: Yeah, I haven’t had anything by my desk in a few days. Kinda weird.

[Alan]: You guys know that informal use of the chat feature is frowned upon, right?

[Brent] changed their chat name to [Brentasaurus Rex]!

[Brentasaurus Rex]: Alan, I can see you through your window stuffing your face with Onion-Ringalos and smiling behind your desk watching the chat log, I swear to God dude don’t be a narc

[Alan]: I’m not smiling, I’m just eating them normally. With my mouth. And they’re not Onion-Ringalos, they’re Garlic-Hooplas.

[Brentasaurus Rex]: Oh wow. Garlic-Hooplas. My bad. COMPLETELY different situation now

[Alan]: Fine. But if Mr. Johnson asks, I tried to stop you.

[Becky]: Soooo I was thinkinggggg…How about we share the weirdest thing that we’ve had to catalog?

[Daniella]: Like no holding back?

[Becky]: Yeah! Everybody give us like the wildest one

[Rick]: I’ll go first. I had to spend three months watching a whale.

[Becky]: A whale? 

[Jimmy]: O.o?

[Alan]: That isn’t very much of a story. 

[Becky]: NO INTERRUPTING STORYTIME! Keep going Rick!!!

[Rick]: It was a baby gray whale. She swallowed a PO thinking it was a toy, had to watch her till it passed. 

[Brentasaurus Rex]: …and did it pass?

[Rick]: Eventually. The problem was, they assumed it would just be a temporary, week-long stay and then they’d release her. By the time it passed, she’d gotten full sized and there was no way we could transfer her from The Museum to the ocean in a humane way. So that’s why if you’re in The Lobby, if you go to the swimming pool and look in the back by the diving boards, you’ll see an unlabelled door. She lives in that door

[Becky]: Wait, are you talking about THE whale???

[Alan]: What happened to no interruptions?

[Becky]: SHUT UP Alan I just realized he’s talking about THE WHALE!

[Jimmy]: O-O 

[Daniella]: I figured that was just a rumor

[Becky]: No, it’s real!! Like, if you go down to floor 3, there’s a BIG break room, room for way more agents than we have, with HUGE glass windows with water in them. I thought it was just a fish tank until I saw her pass by!!

[Rick]: Yep, that’s Beatrice. They shipped in 50-million gallons of seawater, made artificial currents, dropped in fish and a smaller younger mate for her. She’s doing great.

[Jimmy]: ❤

[Alan]: I’m pretty sure that violates at least 3 maritime laws and the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

[Jimmy]: </3

[Bentasaurus Rex]: Well Alan, who’s gonna tell the animal rights people? And you think they’d believe us? Even if they found out? Who’s gonna tell them THE SHADOW GOVERNMENT that DOESN’T EXIST ON PAPER kidnapped a whale, kidnapped another one, and then gave them a happy home?

[Alan]: I was just pointing it out.

[Brentasauruss Rex]: Yeah, sure you were.

[Becky]: My turn! A whale’s pretty weird, but I think mine’s better

[Rick]: Are we trying to one-up each other?

[Becky]:  Duh!!! What’s the point if someone can’t win Wildest Story?

[Becky]:  Besides it’s my idea so I make the rules!

[Becky]: Ok so this was, like, right around my third month or so working at PRIME, I think? And a big wooden crate comes by my desk, shaking. Not the weirdest thing I’d seen at that point, but still. I should’ve been more careful, right? In the crate was an old jewelry box. It was SUPER pretty, like maybe the 1920s or something? Pearls all around the lid, pretty sure it had SOLID GOLD inlay, the works

[Becky]: So I’m testing it, and it’s just sitting on my desk being all pretty and normal, it’s not even shaking anymore. And then I open it. And this, like, HAND comes out, but it’s not a hand, it’s more like

[Becky]: Sorry, hit enter on accident! Okay so imagine if someone made a hand out of old silver and gold jewelry? Like rings for knuckles, bracelet chains for skin, that kind of thing. Just a hand made out of a ton of antique jewelry. Anyway, it grabbed my THROAT!

[Becky]: So I’m like literally dying and I can’t breathe and I’m trying to pull it off of me but it’s SUPER STRONG, like Superman or something. So I grabbed my big Washington Monument paperweight, and started WAILING on it! Just absolutely stabbing and beating the snot out of this jewelry hand until I broke off enough of its fingers and it couldn’t hold on anymore

[Becky]: So when it fell to the ground and started hopping around like a legless spider I grabbed my trash can, threw it on top of the hand, and weighed it down using all my body weight while screaming my head off for help. They had to send in a whole team to get it out because it kept trying to kill them too

[Daniella]: Is that how you got the scar?

[Becky]: Yep one of the rings cut me when I was stabbing the thing. But, like, you can’t really notice it if I wear a necklace so I guess it’s ok

[Jimmy]: ( ..)φ “do not anger Becky”

[Brentasaurus Rex]: Okay MY story is gonna be better than all yall’s and I will die on this hill. I had to analyze a haunted Etch-a-Sketch

[Jimmy]: what is etch-a-sketch? O:O

[Daniella]: Theyre these little toys kids play with. You draw on them, shake em up and the drawing goes away

[Brentasaurus Rex]: Some kid in Ohio had been drawing in it after he found it in a trashcan at his school and every time he shook it to clear the screen, the drawing would come back but WAY WORSE

[Brentasaurus Rex]: Kid drew a house, shook it, house came back a pile of rubble. He drew his dog, shook it, dog came back dead…and with way more legs than a dog should have.

[Brentasaurus Rex]: So P.R.I.M.E. caught wind of it and grabbed it up, naturally. And  OF COURSE they gave it to ME because apparently I “have experience with childhood trauma Objects” … which is true, but also rude.

[Brentasaurus Rex]: Anyway, during testing the Etch-A-Sketch was normal, but I had to test it a few times, and every time I came back it had drawn stuff on its own, and they were all about me, I guess? It was hard to tell for sure because, you know, it’s an Etch-A-Sketch, but it made sure to draw my bow-tie. But my eyes would be X marks and the Etch-A-Sketch would be sitting on top of me. Finally they took the thing away, I assume to The Keep, but it should’ve been thrown into The Vats if I had my way.

[Rick]: Did they not tell you what happened to it?

[Brentasaurus Rex]: They told me it would be better if I “never ask about The Etch-A-Sketch again.” I’m not even allowed to look it up and my Akashic Connection automatically redacts anything about its location. All I can tell is the report on it keeps growing, like it keeps doing something worthy of a report, but it’s all redacted for me.

[Becky]: Alright, that is really, REALLY creepy. Daniella, Jimmy, Alan, you’re up

[Alan]: Save mine for last, mine is going to beat everyone’s, especially Brent’s.

[Becky]: Ok then, Jimmy? Daniella?

[Jimmy]: i have not really had anything yet? mostly normal things

[Daniella]: Thats impossible.

[Brentasaurus Rex]: Dude, you’ve been here for SIX MONTHS. You HAVE to have something. EVERYBODY sees something weird within their first week. It’s like a cop in downtown Havenwood saying they’ve never seen a murder scene before.

[Jimmy]: ヽ(´ー｀)┌  i have not yet

[Rick]: Well, just try anything, man. Give us something you’ve seen, anything.

[Jimmy]: um, last month i got a teddy bear 🙂

[Jimmy]: it was cute! Brown hair, little red tie

[Jimmy]: they told me to test it for Noise but every time i tried i forgot what i was doing

[Daniella]: …

[Jimmy]: i would walk up to my desk and then i would be in the break room

[Jimmy]: or i would try to remember what i was doing and then i would be in the smoking room with a cigarette

[Becky]: Jimmy, like, you don’t smoke?

[Alan]: Plus smoking isn’t allowed in the building because of the You-Know-What.

[Jimmy]: well that is what i thought too so i write a note for myself on my hand that said to test bear. But that still did not work. I kept finding myself avoiding the bear or nearly forgetting to lock the door when i would leave to get take a break from the bear

[Jimmy]: so i find out if i used the mirror in our rooms i could test it without having to go near it or look directly at it

[Jimmy]: turns out it did not have any Noise at all, just a normal bear!

[Rick]: Jesus Christ

[Brentasaurus Rex]: JIMMY

[Jimmy]: What?

[Daniella]: Wheres the bear now???????????

[Jimmy]: they took it down to The Keep. they said there were some P.O.s in the dangerous cells that might like having something to play with 🙂

[Jimmy]: i asked if i could take it home because it was really cute but they said no, it was too important to the other P.O.s to let me keep it 😦

[Daniella]: OMG

[Rick]: Nobody tell him.

[Brentasaurus Rex]: EVER.

[Becky]: I thought we were about to have to go on lockdown again. I could NOT take another week of being cooped up in here while they looked for some stupid teddy bear, not after The Lemon Sapling incident

[Jimmy]: what? No it was not like The Lemon Sapling. it was just a bear ヽ(´ー｀)┌

[Rick]: Don’t worry about it, Jimmy.

[Becky]: Anyway…Daniella, you’re up

[Daniella]: I think i can beat haunted etchasketch. Last year they gave me one of those old polaroid cameras. Looked like itd been beaten up a bunch already before it became a P.O. 

[Daniella]: So of course while i was cataloging i had to take pictures on it. When the first picture printed out i thought id done something wrong. It was a picture of my office, but my desk was in the wrong spot, it was on the right side of the wall instead of the left, it didnt have any of my stuff on it, and the whole place looked like it was falling apart. It was obviously still the museum, it had the same walls and the floor but it was all rusted, falling apart and everything had this gross dark stain on it im pretty sure was blood, and it was so dark i could barely see anything. Whole place looked like somebody’s dropped a bomb on it like that show about the guy that survives the nukes and has to fend for himself.

[Daniella]: So i got an assistant and we decided to test it out using other rooms in the museum. Each picture came out the same way. Slightly different rooms covered in gross stuff. I even tried taking pictures of me and my assistant, but we never showed up in the pictures. The weirdest pictures were the ones from the lobby, though. You guys know how theres always a current picture of the curator and the president side by side in the lobby? Well i dont know which president that was, and i dont know which curator that was, because i looked over and over again at each of the past curators and presidents in the archive just in case our akashic connection messed up, and i couldnt find a single one that matches. And of course they were covered in blood  and grime i even looked like there was a hole in the ceiling (which is weird because we dont have a real ceiling just miles of dirt above our heads), but thats when my assistant noticed something.

[Daniella]: In the lobby, around where we have those tvs and couches by the front desk, there was something in the background. It was big and tall and gray with arms that looked like theyd drag the ground but i couldnt tell because it wasnt fully in the picture. It was like it was running towards something i couldnt see outside of the picture. So we went back and started looking through the other pictures and it was in all of them! So the P.O. experts took it down to study it and that was the last i saw of P.O. 3015. Some creepy camera that never runs out of film and takes pictures of some creepy monster in another reality.

[Alan]: Now it’s my turn! My story is going to beat everyone else’s.

[Brentasaurus Rex]: Oh Lord

[Rick]: Give him the benefit of the doubt, man.

[Alan]: I once spent six months on a stapler.

[Alan]: It was just after P.O.E. 2319 happened in an office over in Texas a few years ago. They wanted every single item in that office cataloged. I worked for weeks on the office supplies, and I got to the stapler. No Paranatural Noise came up when I was analyzing it, so I sent it away and moved on. But Logistics sent it back the next day, complaining that I sent a P.O. to be released. I checked it twice that day, but there still wasn’t any Paranatural Noise. So I sent it away again, and it came back, again.

[Alan]: So the cycle kept repeating, and procedure says we can’t just skip a step, so every week I would have to spend half of my shift testing every single aspect of this stapler. I even started to think I was going crazy, or that somebody in Logistics was pulling a prank on me, so I put a Grumpy Gavin sticker on it to make sure it was the same stapler, and it was.

[Alan]: Finally I had to get Mr. Johnson to watch me test it three times before he assured Logistics that it was just a normal stapler the whole time, but they wouldn’t listen and went over our heads to The Curator. So now down in The Roost there’s just a normal stapler eating up our valuable space in a cell. 

[Brentasaurus Rex]: Wow Alan, that was so amazingly lame. A stapler? A normal stapler?

[Alan]: I thought it was creepy.

[Johnson, Director of Intake] has entered the chat!

[Rick]: Oh Hell

[Alan]: I told you guys this was a bad idea. Mr. Johnson, I said that, in this chat. You can scroll up and see it.

[Johnson, Director of Acquisitions and Documentation] changed their chat name to [Bill]!

[Bill]: A dead fish.

[Becky]: Uhhhhh

[Jimmy]: O.o?

[Daniella]: Wut

[Bill]: When I was starting out in A&D back in the 90’s, one of my first things they brought to me was a dead fish. Had gotten caught up in a P.O.E. in the Pacific, and they threw it in a cardboard box and sent it to me. Just this little silver thing, leaking juice all over the floor through the cardboard. No heartbeat, thing had been dead for at least a week, but wasn’t rotten, it kept dripping saltwater like it was fresh out of the ocean, and its eyes kept looking at me, following me, blinking, and giving me this horrible sick feeling in my stomach. 

[Bill]: You ever had something look at you and could just tell what they were thinking? Well I could tell this thing hated me. Not anger, or rage, but this feeling like I was something that shouldn’t exist. Like I was wrong and it could see that and wanted to erase everything that was even somehow related to me. I nearly crapped myself. When they took it down to The Roost I could still feel it watching me, like a bad itch I couldn’t get rid of for weeks until it finally settled down. I take routine trips down to The Roost now, just to make sure it’s still in there on its stand, staring at whatever passes by and hating everything.
[Rick]: Spooky, Bossman.

[Bill]: Thanks. Now, we’ve got incoming P.O.s in ten minutes, people, get your game faces on. Looks like it was a big P.O.E.

[Becky]: Back to the grind.

[Rick]: See you guys on break.

[Alan]: Hey wait, who won?

[Becky] has ended the group chat “Catalogers!”

“The chat window closes. The real work begins again. Somewhere in The Roost, a dead fish continues to stare at nothing and everything with unyielding hatred. Somewhere in The Keep, a camera waits to showcase a world where everything went wrong. And within the glass-lined cubicles of Acquisitions and Documentation, seven people return to their desks, carrying the weight of things that should never be remembered, but can never be forgotten. 

Just another Tuesday at P.R.I.M.E. Just another day here…In the Southern Fringe.”

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