Do not edit other writers' sandboxes without permission.
“Say that again.” The sound of fingers tapping on wood echoed hollowly in Dr. Everett Mann’s office.
“I’m going to weaponize my butterflies.”
“Butterflies are fragile. We lost a lot of SCP-408 the last time they were used for combat.” Mann folded his hands on his desk. Today, his gloves were pristine.
“I have an idea.”
“Why should I care about this idea?” Mann flicked at a nonexistent speck of dust.
Dr. Zyn Kiryu—she’d stopped going by “researcher” the day she completed her Foundation doctorate—dropped a folder onto Mann’s desk. The weight of it was enough to topple one of his paperweights.
Mann rifled through the first few sheets, then split the documents in half and read from the middle. “Ah,” he said at length, “Your doctorate research.”
Zyn nodded. “I know you received the memo I was sent this morning. I’m to move my nebula butterflies to Site-17 when I transfer there next week. Overwatch wants me to develop something that can stand up to a Keter. I’m making mercenaries out of messengers, so the talk goes—”
“Breathe before you choke on your words, Zyn.” Mann continued to glance through the proposal. “You prepared this in five hours?”
“Five years. It’s been a long time coming.” Zyn tugged out a file from the packet and flipped it over the sheet Mann had topmost. The file detailed an intensive examination of 408’s ability to manipulate its body chemistry to achieve its illusions. Zyn’s career-long project had involved butterflies spun of light, but their framework was built on the illusory Lepidopterans she’d spent her first few years chasing.
“I know I want to work with 408. I don’t know why Command wants me in 17, or why the nebula project is suddenly a primary concern, but I’m going to make the most of it,” Zyn continued, holding her tone steady. “And to do that, I’d like certain things to be waiting for me when I get to the new site. Clearance for 408’s aviary. A fully-equipped BME lab. Access to Bio-Research Area-12.”
“So, say that again.” Mann closed the folder and tucked it away in one of his desk drawers.
Zyn paused, thought a moment, and cracked a small grin. “Dr. Mann,” she began, “I’m ready to start crosstesting.”
When Zyn showed up at Site-17, her Biomedical Engineering lab was already waiting for her.
The first thing she noticed upon entering the lab was a strong scent of formaldehyde. Zyn’s eyes traveled over the stainless steel cabinets, scanned the glass-paneled cupboards of glassware, and landed on the centermost lab bench.
Sitting on the table were three objects: a glass jar filled with clear liquid labeled “for the booterflies”, a map of Bio-Research Area-12 (complete with comments on the facility scrawled in ballpoint pen), and a severed arm with its hand positioned in a thumbs-up gesture. Said arm had a bright pink ribbon tied around its wrist, and no tag or card or anything sort of identification.
She should've known Mann wouldn't do her a favor without leaving his calling card as a reminder of the debt.
Zyn considered repositioning the fingers to make the hand flip the bird and leaving it for Mann to find. Instead she picked up the arm, ribbon and all, and stuffed it into a cold storage locker. She stuck a “DO NOT OPEN” note on the door, and headed to SCP-408’s aviary, jar of sugar water in tow.
The next day when Shen entered the aviary, he narrowly avoided stepping on Zyn’s face.
“What’s with the sleeping bag?” Shen asked.
“It takes an hour or so to get everything connected.” Zyn was lying down, hands crossed over her stomach. Six butterflies meandered around her arms, neck, and face. Her eyes were closed, but the agent had a feeling she could still see him.
“You need an hour of skin-contact napping before you can work with the butterflies?”
“No. Thinking. Letting my thoughts expand in the space around me. Letting my thoughts mingle with theirs, until the borders get fuzzy.” Zyn’s voice held a strange sort of cadence, as if groups of words were being spoken by different people taking turns.
Shen’s reply, when it came, was sharp. “Have you noticed any adverse effects?”
Zyn’s expression remained serene, and as she continued to talk, her voice normalized. “General fatigue. A persistent craving for sugary drinks and light basking, in turn.” She stood up and stretched, and the butterflies moved with her. There were three nebula-and-408 pairs: a butterfly at both ears, wrists, and the sides of her throat.
Shen didn’t fail to notice. “Is there a reason you changed the configuration? Wasn’t the previous one sufficient?” he asked almost casually, watching Zyn rotate her limbs as if she’d never used them before.
“The crown?” Zyn made a sweeping motion with her right arm, and a trio of nebula butterflies fluttered over and settled on her right shoulder. “It was… uncomfortable. This pattern works better. It allows communication as well as command.” She turned slowly on the spot, and part of the 408 swarm flew close and turned with her in midair.
“You don’t feel… uncomfortable, sharing your thoughts?” Shen sat down and opened the antiques case, began to polish some of the blades.
“Not really. It’s a little disorienting since they can see colors I can’t. And they see in pictures, sophisticated ones.” Zyn opened and closed her hands a few times, eyes distant. “It’s like watching multiple video feeds in a security booth. And they’ve all got music playing.” She held out her left arm and 408 instances coalesced around it, warping until it looked like she was wearing a gauntlet made of butterfly wings. “The trick is to focus on a few screens at a time, and trust the messengers to keep an eye on everything else.”
Shen looked up from his polishing. “Messengers?”
Zyn nodded, pointed at her head, wrist, neck. “Three 408, three nebula. Brain waves, pulse, breathing. Mind, body, soul.” She laughed a little, the sound somewhat hollow.
“How did you pick them?”
“I asked for volunteers. They’re doing me a favor, so I want them to have a say.” Zyn shrugged, and the butterflies crawled around her arms. “When you share a mind, you want as little conflict as possible.”
[insert catchy line about site transfers or things moving or strings being pulled idk]
[ALSO REVISE ENTIRE THING TO MAKE LITTLE HINTS AT SUBPLOT MORE CONSISTENT especially re: Zyn being suspicious about higher-ups, or not]
TO DO LIST OF DOOM:
- make those italicized thought bits less awkward
- more kicking ass less introspection
- dance with me into the night in flight there's butterflies alright
- Look up predatory behaviors of tigers (how to do the hunting)
23:21 Clef Zyn must become a literal butterfly ninja.
23:21 Zyn YESSSSSSSSS
23:22 Clef "VANISH!" (408 swarms around her and she disappears)
So Zyn learns hand and arm commands and also spoken words and eye movements???
LITERAL BUTTERFLY NINJA
Let's have some one-syllable commands:
blade
"Hush"/pointer finger over mouth = butterflies make Zyn (and themselves) disappear
stars
"Blink"/hand pulls closed into fist =
both
"Shield"/flick fingers open from hand = butterflies congregate around Zyn
Also, codenames. "Blade" for weaponized 408, "stars" for nebulae" (also blade stars is like shuriken KUKUKUKUKU)
YEAH YOU KNOW WHAT WE DON'T NEED THIS POINTLESS BUILDUP AT THE BEGINNING SET THE STAGE WITH ACTIONNNN
LET'S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS
AND RIGHT TO CROSSTESTING YESSSSS
-- [START READING HERE PLEASE]
“Could you say that again?” Fingers tapped an idle pattern. The sound echoed hollowly in Dr. Everett Mann’s office.
“I want to weaponize 408.”
“We lost rather a lot of them the last time they were used for combat.” Mann folded his hands on his desk. Today, his gloves were pristine.
“I have an idea.”
“That's good. Everyone should have something nice.” Mann flicked at a nonexistent speck of dust.
Dr. Zyn Kiryu—she’d stopped going by “researcher” the day she completed her Foundation doctorate— dropped a folder onto Mann’s desk. The weight of it was enough to topple one of his paperweights.
Mann rifled through the first few sheets, then split the documents in half and read from the middle. “Ah,” he said at length, “Your doctorate research.”
Zyn nodded. “I know you received the memo I was sent this morning. My nebula butterflies are in incubation, so I have no issues moving them to Site-17 when I transfer there next week. But now that the research is suspended, I need a new project.”
“Breathe before you choke on your works, Zyn.” Mann continued to glance through the proposal. “You prepared this in five hours?”
“No. Five years.” Zyn tugged out a file from the packet and flipped it over the sheet Mann had topmost. The file detailed an intensive examination of 408’s ability to manipulate its own body chemistry to facilitate its illusions. Zyn’s career-long project had involved butterflies spun of light, but the framework was built on the one SCP object she’d spent her early Foundation days chasing to no avail.
“I know I’ll work with 408. I don’t know why Command wants me in 17, or why the nebula project is on hold, but I’m going to make the most of it,” Zyn continued. “And to do that, I’d like certain things to be waiting for me when I get to the new site. Clearance for 408’s aviary. Access to Bio-Research Area-12.”
“So, say that again.” Mann closed the folder and tucked it away in one of his desk drawers.
Zyn paused, and cracked a small grin. “Dr. Mann,” she began, “I’m ready to start crosstesting.”
[NANANANA TRAINING MONTAGE WHERE ZYN GETS ACCESS TO 143 SOMEHOW AND LET'S GLOSS OVER THAT BECAUSE PROTOCOL IS TEH BORINGS]
Instead, Shen teaches Zyn how to through 408 shuriken in act two, because he's a cool guy and the previous drafts didn't really show that, geez.
"I'm Agent Tai Yang Shen, and I'm here to teach you how to throw shuriken." And then he drags out this huge case of antique throwing stars of various shapes and sizes and Zyn's all "holy shit the Foundation has this stuff on hand for random testing??" and Shen's all like "nah this is my personal collection. I like antiques." BECAUSE HE IS A DORK WHO MINORED IN ART HISTORY
YEAAAHHHH
"Miss Zyn Kiryu?"
Zyn twitched involuntarily. She's been in the aviary enough to know how sound echoes though it, [SET UP THE SCENE HERE]
"I'm here to teach you to dance," Agent Shen stated as he set down the carrying case. Zyn stared at him blankly. The agent rolled his eyes. "Alright, fine, I'm here to teach you how to throw knives," he amended. Zyn just kept staring.
Shen didn't say anything further as he knelt on the aviary floor and unlatched the case.
"The Foundation keeps sets of old-fashioned weapons on hand?" Zyn asked, curiosity overcoming her wariness.
The Chinese agent shook his head. "Not exactly… This is my own set. Part of my agent training involved antique combat apparatus." He picked up a thin-bladed knife, about the length of his hand, and twirled it through his fingers. "You never know where a minor in Art History will get you."
[more banter here]
"It's been two weeks since I've started the treatment." Zyn beckoned a small cluster of floating 408 to her. Marked with a special tag on their abdomen, these special instances—bladewood 408, Zyn dubbed them—had been fed an esoteric blend of processed sap from trees of the jinki no kodachi, the Bladewood Grove.
The bladewood instances landed obligingly on her outstretched arm, and Zyn examined each pair of wings in turn: visible more than ever before was a thin, near-translucent sheen of pale pink that outlined the wings. Formulating the crosstest had been a gamble, but Zyn had read every document on 408's transformational abilities, and done further tests in the lab, peeling apart the secret of how 408 could rearrange its chemical structure to facilitate the illusions. All it needed to become a weapon was the right chemicals.
As she heard her special butterflies flap their wings, Zyn felt an inordinate sort of pride as she listened to the barely-perceptible open-and-closing shing shing, the sound of a whetstone worked over a fine knife.
NANANANANAA INSERT SOME TRANSITION HERE ALSO TRIM THIS DOWN AND ADD SOME WORTHWHILE STUFF SO PEOPLE WILL GIVE A CRAP ABOUT ZYN X 408 BFFSOTPFOREVER. MUTUAL RESPECT. Zyn checks up with the swarm/flock often and one time she stays late patching up the ones that get injured during testing and she falls asleep in the aviary and she wakes up and they made an illusory blanket for her awwww
She spends three days of pipetting, centrifuging, and of course, waiting. The chemical cocktail she ends up with is an esoteric blend nutrients with a special ingredient—the anomalous amino acids that give 143 its distinctive, deadly properties.
When she's due to rendezvous with SCP-408, Zyn double-checks and triple-checks her equipment. She doesn't bring the extract yet, she brings a box of something she'll use to pique 408's interest. It sits heavily in her pocket as she enters the aviary.
KONDRAKI, the word appears in the butterflies' wings. They rustle, as if accusingly. WHERE. A pause, and the room is filled with a pattern of endless question marks, splayed across the walls,
"I don't know," Zyn says truthfully. "But I'm here to take care of you now. To give you the protection you want." She withdraws the box, opens it, and carefully lifts a slim pink petal from a bed of foam. "See the edges? These are very, very sharp." She turns the shingle-like petal in her hands and walks to one of the trees in the aviary. She brings the edge down on a young branch.
The wood parts soundlessly and the branch thuds to the ground. 408 disperses, swarming around the now-bare stump, some of the butterflies cautiously landing on Zyn's fingers and batting at the petal's glass-smooth surface.
STRONG, is written in the wings.
"Yes. And I know how to make you just as strong. I'm going to be your handler for a little while, alright?"
KNOW YOU
Again, everyone else seems to know more than she does. Zyn keeps her composure steady. "You know who I am?"
OTHERS TALK. KIRYU.
Zyn is silent.
KIRYU KIRYU KIRYU her name, repeated endlessly, flashes from wall to wall in a disorienting sort of hail to the queen. Zyn breathes slowly, in and out. Well, if it was going to know her name…
"To you, I'm just Zyn. Z, y, n."
ZYN?
She smiles, and holds out a hand in the midst of the butterflies. "I will trust you. And I hope you'll trust me." A cluster of 408 lifts up from the main swarm, and coalesces into the illusion of a disembodied arm, phantom hand outstretched. Zyn shakes, without applying pressure. She can't tell where the borders of the illusory wings are.
The rest of the swarm settles before her like a blanket caught in midair, some of the individual butterflies perching in her shoulder-length hair. ZYN is written in their wings.
"Yes," she says, her voice small in the wide aviary. "Zyn. That's me."
"Are you ready?"
It's been a week of feeding diluted bladewood extract. 408 rivals children in its pickiness, but Zyn patiently mixes and remixes different concentrations of the chemical cocktail until she finds ratios that the butterflies are satisfied with. Cooking for butterflies—be patient, be humble, Zyn smiles while she processes each batch.
Eventually the time comes to run preliminary tests on the first bladewood instance. The butterfly is now distinguished by both a tag on its abdomen and the faint pink sheen that covers its body. And there's a barely-perceptible shing shing sound when it opens and closes its wings, the sound of a whetstone worked over a fine knife.
One by one, Zyn holds up a maple leaf, a swatch of leather, and then finally, raw meat lumps of various thicknesses. One by one, they're split in half as the lone 408 instance launches itself into the air and cleaves straight through each obstacle. The movement is swift and silent, and the slash is almost imperceptible in its clean cut: laser-like precision, with the subtlety of a butterfly's wingbeat.
Zyn's hands shake as she notes the success down.
After the logs have been sent off, Zyn busies herself with cleanup, dabbing blood splatter off the 408 test subject's wings. The grooming is made easier by the hardened glasslike material that's formed over the previously-fragile wing scales. This butterfly is strong, possibly just as near-indestructible as a bladewood tree.
I may have created a monster. She watches the rest of the 408 swarm whirl around her, curious. A cluster of 408 sits on her head like some sort of bizarre crown: Zyn can feel them shifting around in her hair, tugging on the strands, waiting, impatient.
[AND THEN SHEN SHOWS UP AND ZYN LEARNS TO THROW BUTTERFLY SHURIKEN]
SOMETHING SOMETHING 408 ISN'T ACTUALLY SPINNING, BUT JUST GETTING TOSSED FORWARD
WHEE. THROW AGAIN, it says. And then Zyn and Shen have fun with targets.
"I'm still not sure entirely about this," Zyn says as she stands in the experimental room, surrounded by her butterflies. "It's been awhile since I'd worked with the nebulae." She shifts from foot to foot, evening out her balance.
The overhead intercom crackles; Mann's voice is uncompromising. "If it would hurt you to lose them, the answer is obvious." A panel on the ceiling slides open, and a small flock of sparrows flows into the enclosure. "Don't lose them. Time to dance, Miss Kiryu."
Zyn nods—swallows are natural predators of butterflies, she knows. The bladewood 408 rustle their wings, the light butterflies swivel to face her. Zyn holds her hands steady, and makes a mental count of the flock.
"You heard the man. Time to dance…" She watches the swallows' movements, the birds sweeping through the high-ceiling enclosure like a cloud. "Alright. 408, you're not allowed to disguise yourself for this test. So you'll have to trust me, and trust your new friends."
Two minutes and thirty-eight seconds later, there are no sparrows in flight. The small birds are perched or lying on the ground, eyes glazed over by the blinding strobe-like cacophony of light emanating from the nebula butterflies' wings. The bladewood 408 have carefully trimmed the tail feathers while the birds were distracted—these swallows won't be flying straight for months.
"Too soft, Zyn. You shan't last long with that kind of heart. Haven't you wanted to try sparrow with potatoes?"
Zyn ignores the barbs that continue to stream from the intercom. She likes birds, and until Mann sends out something more dangerous, she's not going to go for any of the trickier maneuvers.
She can't help but feel a little conflicted. Before the Foundation, her experience with animal testing was limited. There were ethics measures her lab had to adhere to, there was an inherent respect for each creature manipulated for the tests, every life was valuable—Zyn shakes her head and turns to point three fingers at an oncoming bluejay. The nearest nebula and two bladewoods accost the bird in midair.
There's too much activity whirling around her. She can question morality later. Her best friend in college cut up mouse lungs on a daily basis, damn it.
The jay goes down, and Zyn approaches it with a stalking tread. She carefully picks up the bird in her gloved hands, and places it in a waiting wall cavity that has slotted open, presumably for removal of test material. It's possibly the fortieth bird so far. Zyn refuses to think about what will happen to them after the experiment.
On the other side of the glass, Mann smirks wickedly. "This will be the last battery." He flips a switch. "I'm sending in the tiger."
OKAY ZYN YOU'RE A LADY OF WAR NO TIME TO FEEL SMALL OR INCONSEQUENTIAL IT'S TIME TO KICK ASS
- disappear
- pace around the tiger
- target the feet and load-bearing
- make it painful to move
- classical conditioning reference? The tiger moves, she throws a butterflyiken
"Someone needs you to make a naked Scarlett Johannsen illusion. You've got two hours."
Zyn sets down her cup of tea before she can choke on it. She'd only been in the aviary for a few minutes, a follow-up checkup on the 408 mass, when Mann strode in with the order. She blinks. "I… will I receive any documentation about this? A memo? Some sort of item request?"
"Of course. In about half an hour, I imagine. But I thought I'd give you a head start seeing as lives depend on this illusion being convincing." Mann waves a hand airily, as if commenting on the weather. "It's only sporting."
"Lives depend…? How much of the 408 mass do you need?" Zyn's eyes narrow. "What kind of threat scenario?"
"Just focus on the task. Things will be explained in due course. Not to worry, Zynderella, your invitation to the ball is due to arrive any day now." Mann chuckles, and practically glides towards the aviary exit. "Two hours."
As the door clangs shut, Zyn snorts. If Cinderella had psychedelic butterflies and razor-winged butterflies, she'd be queen in a week. No need for a royal ball, no need for a prince.
Scrunching her lab coat into a crude pillow, Zyn stuffs it behind her head and leans back against the aviary wall, hands folded on her knees. She stares up at the shifting patterns of 408: today they're amusing themselves pretending to be sakura petals dancing on an unseen wind. Falling in an eternal shower, thousands of tumbling pink flakes whirl in a storm that blankets the open space above.
She remembers the thrill of the tests. But she also remembers the forlorn cawing of a downed raven, sitting in the remains of its own shredded flight feathers, still completely disoriented by her light butterflies. She harmed a living creature to do nothing more than prove a point, and that feels somehow wrong.
Three hours later, Zyn watches a woman with a sniper rifle put a bullet through an illusion of Scarlett Johannsen and into a reality bender's head. The illusion bursts into a cloud of flesh-colored butterflies, flapping in disarray, as a kid in a T-shirt and sweat pants slumps to the ground, his skull blasted open.
The agent works the bolt of her rifle. At the sound of a second gunshot, Zyn breathes out a slow hiss.
The bladewoods will survive, she made sure of it. She's proud of them, yes, but angry as well. Is this what her creations were intended for all along? Is this what the Foundation's lauded goals to protect humanity come down to? A bullet in the head of a boy playing video games on a couch?
The agent gets up and safes her weapon. Zyn follows her wordlessly down the hallway as demolitions technicians emerge to dismantle their charges.
No matter what she needed to do, she'd do it right.
She knows there's blood on her name now. She won't let it touch her hands.
Hello Zyn. Hi Zyn. Hello Zyn hi Zyn hi hi Zyn hi hello Zyn hi Zyn Zyn hi…
“Can you make them quiet?” Mann asks.
Zyn raises a closed hand, flicking it open as her fingers brush against her thumb with a frssh sound. The small room falls quiet. “Apologies. It’s a check to make sure they’re functional. The broken ones will actually sound broken.” Her voice is steadier than it was years ago, but then, she has a couple dozen little allies clustered around her. She leans back a bit in her chair, and regards the butterflies fondly as they meander around the desk separating her and her superior.
“Right, right.” A shuffling of papers. “We're impressed. I'm impressed.”
“I’m glad to hear that, sir.” It is not the first time she has repeated those words.
“Have you read the files?” Dr. Mann is unreadable as always to her.
“Yes. But you’ve called me here because there’s something I haven’t been told yet, I presume.” Zyn taps out a series of patterns on the chair’s armrest, and three of the basking light butterflies lift off the desk to settle on her arm. She pats their antennae gently. It took them three weeks to learn that.
Dr. Mann watches with veiled amusement. “Indeed. You seem to have developed a fairly decent rapport with SCP-408, and your, ah, pet project has come along marvelously as well.” He knocks one of the light butterflies off his lamp and levels a discerning glance at his protégée. “Researcher… no, Doctor Kiryu, it is of overseer consensus that the first round of recruitment procedures will be performed by you. You will not let me down.”
Anticipation? Unease? Nervousness?
Fear, Zyn realizes. This is fear, pure and encompassing and slicing right to the core like a knife into rotten fruit. How long since she stepped outside her carefully-woven web of securities and guarantees and simply tossed preparation to the wind and took a chance?
She decides. She’s going to go off script. She’d followed the pre-prepared lines since the start of the interview, but now… now was time to break formation. After all, she’d already been authorized to do it (“at your discretion”). She’d done her plotting. Now it was time to act.
When she next speaks to the sole other individual in the room, Zyn’s voice is soft, and the barely-there smirk on her face is feral. “We need a champion, and you need a challenge.” She taps her fingers, and waits.
During the pause, lepidopterans with wings of light flutter into visibility. They cover the walls, the ceiling, the doors, their luminescent nebulae-bearing scales warping and writhing with mesmerizing kaleidoscopic patterns. These butterflies are all the backup she was allowed in the room. The rest of the team (all humans, all armored, all armed) are waiting outside the blast doors, and Zyn has no intention of calling for them. The allies she trusts the most are the ones she picks for herself.
“Warrior,” she addresses the being, “how would you like to see the battlefield again?”
The tattooed figure glares at the tapestry of light undulating around him, but responds with a smile of his own.
I LIKE THIS SCENE A LOT BUT IT DOESN'T MOVE THE PLOT ALONG ANY, SO I'M PUTTING THIS IN AUTHOR NOTES AS A DELETED SCENE BECAUSE SHEN COOKING IS LOVE ;-; <3
There's still a nagging guilt sitting in Zyn's stomach as she enters the kitchen.
"I've learned a lot from cooking rice balls," Shen announces as he steps gracefully around the kitchen space, arranging various cooking implements in front of him and setting a pot of water on the stove.
Zyn makes a small noise of curiosity and shuffles to the side to give the agent space. "What have you learned from rice balls?" she asks after the water begins to steam.
"Be patient," Shen says as he stirs the soon-to-be soup with a pair of chopsticks. "It's not so much waiting for the water to boil as it is watching for the right level of boil. Some people watch the bubbles. I listen to them instead." He slides the frozen tangyuan from the packaging and spoons them into the now-boiling water.
He pokes each rice ball with the chopsticks and continues, "Stay humble. Complacency leads to mistakes. The first time I made tangyuan from a pre-frozen package, I ended up with watery rice flour soup because I didn't bother to read the instructions."
Zyn had been walking towards the small table in the room, but something about the statement and Shen's near-wistful tone makes her hesitate before sitting down. "You've cooked homemade rice balls?" she asks carefully. The man doesn't even use his own name anymore, so it may be useless asking about his off-the-clock history. Zyn's already found that it's useless to ask the man anything at all, really—so far she's still in the dark about who's watching her project, and why.
There's a slight pause from Shen, but Zyn swears she can hear the man's smile when he next speaks. "Yes. With my family, overseas." He leaves it at that as he continues to stir the bubbling soup.
Zyn sits at the table tapping out a rhythm with her fingers. She decides to be forthright with her thoughts. "You know, with all your philosophical talk and your experience in the field, you seem unreal. A movie character, or some sort of plot device of a mentor figure."
There's the sound of rummaging as Shen locates a bowl and spoon in the cupboard. "I'm flattered, but if this scenario were a movie, I'd probably be dead many times over. Mentor characters have an alarming tendency to die. Force the hero to get their act together." He deposits a steaming bowl in front of Zyn: four perfect tangyuan bobbing cheerfully in clear liquid, a porcelain spoon sticking out the side.
"Four? Isn't that an unlucky number?" Zyn comments, and then remembers what she'd read in the agent's file. He'd made his name working with SCP-1334, the homicidal ghost with a thing for lucky numbers. Shen's probably had enough lucky number jokes to last a lifetime. Would rice ball soup wash out the taste of foot in mouth?
Then Zyn sees Shen's expression, and has to stifle a giggle at the bemused look he's sporting as he looks at the empty tangyuan packaging in his hand as if he's never seen it before.
"There's always eight in the package," he says at last, and turns off the stove before walking over to the table. He tosses the empty box into the trashcan next to Zyn's chair. "I guess I'm not used to sharing."
Zyn just looks at him incredulously and the agent shrugs. "Pretend they're leaves on a clover," Shen leans over and uses his chopsticks to rearrange the rice balls into a more aesthetically pleasing arrangement. "If the odds seem against you, make your own luck."
As he turns to fill his own bowl, Shen looks over his shoulder. "Oh, and don't drink soup when you're actively chewing. You'll choke."
Zyn blinks and puts down the spoon she'd been sipping from. She finishes chewing in thoughtful silence.
