The Magnus Protocol 42 - Hostile Workplace

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RustyQuill presents

The Magnus Protocol

Episode 42

Hostile Workplace

Alice, Alice, are you alright?

No,

no.

Alice, wake up.

Come on, stop messing around.

Lost it.

Damn, that thing moves quick.

How is she?

I...

I don't know.

She won't wake up.

Shit.

How long has she been out for?

Twenty seconds?

Maybe thirty?

Wait me in an hour.

Christ, Alice.

Don't do that to me.

No promises.

I'll radio Melanie.

She should be able to call in a medical team to- Uh- Oh!

What?

Your arm.

My arm.

Jesus!

When did it happen?

Uh, it must have been when it grabbed me.

What's going on?

Nothing.

Nothing.

I'm fine.

I just need to.

I'll be back in a second.

Can you

see out of them?

What?

No!

Oh, God, will I start to?

I don't know.

We've seen a lot, but this is

new.

What do we do?

Oh, we can't just leave them in case it gets worse.

Worse?

How can it get worse?

Let's just say we need to get rid of them.

But how do you get rid of extra eyeballs?

I mean, I assume the normal way.

The normal way?

Oh, Christ.

Everything okay out there?

All good.

Alice, do you have a sewing kit?

In the dresser, top drawer.

Thanks.

No.

It's just like Lansing a boy.

You don't know that.

You'd rather they stuck around?

Well, then.

Give me a couple of minutes.

Just keep an eye on Alice.

Oh, ha ha.

How are we doing?

Feels like I was drinking tequila all night, but yeah, I'm okay, I think.

I thought I'd lost you.

One all, I guess.

I don't follow.

I already lost you, remember?

It was your turn.

Alright.

Yeah.

That's alright.

I know you're not my Sam, but you're damn close.

And now you're leaving, too.

Yeah.

Sorry.

It's okay.

Are you sure you can't work things out with your Alice?

I don't know.

Last time we talked.

You should try doing an apocalypse together.

Did wonders for us.

I'll give it some thought.

Just

make sure you survive this time, yeah?

Alice.

Okay.

Good news is I found a nice big needle.

Great news is Melanie's managed to call in a med team and they're on their way.

Bad news is, they said we need to sort your arm ASAP.

What's wrong with Sam?

Nothing serious, just some minor first aid.

Right, Sam?

Uh, yeah,

yeah, it's nothing.

So, I heated it over the stove, and I even found some old rubbing alcohol kicking around with some clean rags, so we should be good to go.

Is it going to hurt?

Probably.

Is that gonna be a problem?

No, good.

Bite down and close your eyes.

Easy for you to see.

It's all right, Sam.

I've got you.

Hold him.

Try him.

It's okay.

Right.

That should do it.

You can let him go now.

See?

That wasn't so bad, was it?

The medics can take a proper look at the station, but if any luck, we've stopped them spreading at least.

How are you doing?

If you're gonna puke, try and keep your arm out of the way.

No,

no, I'm fine.

I just

just need

to

some.

He's out.

He'll be fine.

He's had a big day.

Scratching at the bandages won't help.

Trust me.

You have no idea how.

You maybe want to try that again?

Sorry, it just...

It itches like crazy.

Oh god, what if they're growing back?

Then I'll take a pair.

Look, I wouldn't worry.

The doctor isn't.

This is nowhere near the weirdest thing we've seen from the zone.

We had a rookie a a couple of years back who got stuck in there for too long, and you wouldn't believe where he started growing a new face.

How's Alice?

Sleeping.

But they say she'll recover quick if she doesn't do anything stupid.

That's good.

Where's Georgie?

I thought she'd want to be here.

Well, given what we're dealing with, she thought it best to go and get.

Speak of the devil.

This is the one I was telling you about.

Miss Hussain?

Have we met?

Oh, uh, I suppose not.

Sorry, I'm Sam.

Georgie got me up to speed.

So you've met my double?

Yeah, you were a deputy head.

At a school?

Uh, yeah.

Huh.

Was it a good school?

I mean, it was pretty fancy.

Sam, I brought Basira in to help because she, myself, and Melanie are, as far as we know, the last people alive who dealt with our archivist back in the day.

So it is John then?

Or his double at least?

We don't know.

But you did see it.

What I saw,

it was so transformed, so inhuman.

If it was him, he's completely gone now.

Okay, sorry, hold up.

Can I get, like, an explanation of who this John guy is or something?

As far as I know, this is a monster that came over with me from my world, and now you're acting like he's an old friend.

Georgie, you care to do the honours?

You tell it better.

Alright.

So, a few years ago, before everything went to hell, we had a

colleague.

A friend?

Eh.

A guy called Jonathan Sims.

He was the archivist for the Magnus Institute, and we all ended up working there at one point or another.

Except Georgie.

So, anyway, he got wrapped up in bad supernatural stuff the same as we did, but he got it the worst.

It turned him into kind of um external.

What?

No, no, shut up.

He turned into something that sent the whole world to hell.

Eventually, he managed to undo it, but it killed him and

someone else we cared about.

Well, they disappeared.

At the exact same time that the building they were in completely exploded.

That doesn't feel like much of a stretch.

I mean, you say that, but let's not do this again.

So, you think this archivist might be the same as your archivist?

Maybe.

The eye stuff, the monologues, it's definitely similar.

Where did your archivist come from?

I mean, we don't know exactly.

Best guess.

We have

had a Magnus Institute in my world, but it burned down about 25 years ago.

Lucky.

I guess.

But me and Alice, my Alice, went poking around in the ruins, and we think we might have accidentally disturbed it.

Do you know how long it had been down there?

No, but it must have been trapped a long time.

Since the place was destroyed, at least.

Maybe longer.

Hmm.

The timelines don't work.

That's assuming time is the same everywhere, which we already know isn't the case.

True.

The Institute, the one in your world, did it still serve the eye?

I don't know what that means.

Did it do a lot of collecting stories, taking statements?

No, no, I don't think so.

It was more into alchemy.

Alchemy?

What, like lead into gold?

More like lead plus fear into gold, but yeah, sure.

Interesting.

So then, what's this eye you said your institute was working on?

Lots to unpack there.

Not it.

Fine.

So in our world, fear was like a supernatural force, okay?

And it was chopped up into 14 entities.

14 and a half, really.

Whatever.

The The point is, each one was tied to a specific kind of fear.

Like, the corruption was all disease and filth and bugs.

Or the spiral was kind of like madness and not trusting yourself.

Or the hunt, which.

You get the idea.

And your eye was one of these entities?

The eye was a power, yes.

One obsessed with being watched.

But that's not how it works where you come from, is it?

I don't think so.

My job is was categorising these things for the government, and we had a whole index of way more specific listings.

Can you give me an example?

Uh, sure.

So, like, when I was a kid, I applied for the Magnus Institute's Gifted Kids Outreach Programme, and, well, long story short, I saw a man's skeleton glow its way free of his body.

Sounds like flesh to me.

Maybe buried.

So, what did your index say about it?

Oh, uh,

I think it was something like alchemy cross-reference with human bones or something.

Okay.

But that's not the one I was thinking about.

That was just the setup.

Thorn.

So, going through that left me with a real phobia of skeletons.

Not surprising, really.

I get why it was kind of funny.

At least why everyone always laughed when I told them.

So, after a while, I just stopped telling them.

It makes sense.

I mean, we see skeletons as kind of goofy, right?

Dancing cartoon bones and cheesy Halloween decorations.

If people have seen a real one, it was probably cleaned, polished, and hung up in a museum somewhere.

Not many people have seen them fresh and bloody, with fat and muscles still clinging to them.

As a kid, the phobia was really intense.

I don't know how many Halloween meltdowns my parents had to deal with over the years, but I never told them what happened at the Magnus Institute.

I didn't think they would believe me, and now I'm certain they wouldn't.

Even now, I can see you smirking and I do get it.

But handing the other kids a cheat code for bullying you is a bad idea so by the time I was in my mid-teens I'd learned to hide it, just calling myself a bit of a scaredy cat.

I still had to steal myself when October rolled around but it generally didn't affect my life as much as it had when I was younger.

Then I started trading to be a lawyer.

I went corporate, nothing sexy like a barrister.

I'd never had a calling, so I thought I might as well make good money while doing something that I at least found mildly interesting.

Anyway, it takes years to qualify, even after finishing your degree and taking all the courses, so I took a job as a paralegal at Ackman Blaine.

It wasn't what I expected.

There were three others on my team.

Natasha Merrill, Anastasia Russing, and Anthony something.

I forget his last name.

As soon as I met them, I knew we weren't going to get along.

My parents were pretty well off, all told, but these three were something else.

Every one of them was there because of some family connection, and none of them had any doubt about where their career was going.

Natasha was occasionally kind to me, in a charity case kind of way, but as far as the other two were concerned, I might as well have been something they scraped off their shoe.

And on top of all the rest of the pressure that comes with working as a paralegal, it didn't take long for it to start to get to me.

Six months in, and I was already getting hit hit with the holy trinity of insomnia, depression and burnout.

Then Halloween came around.

One of them, I think it must have been Anthony, went around taping little cartoon skeletons to all the monitors.

It wasn't aimed at me.

I hadn't been stupid enough to tell any of them, but I...

uh it reacted badly

i don't remember what happened exactly But I knew it ended with me crying at my desk.

Natasha asked me what was wrong, and I don't know, maybe it was because she was occasionally nice to me, but I ended up telling her.

She nodded, very sympathetic, and said she'd get Anthony to take the skeletons down.

He did, and that was the last I heard of it.

Until about a month later, when Anastasia asked me to help her get a ream of paper down from the top shelf of the stationery cupboard.

It wasn't a suspicious thing to do.

She couldn't have been more than five foot two, and it wasn't the first time she'd asked me to fetch something.

So, it came as a complete surprise when the door slammed shut behind me.

The cupboard was shallow enough that it didn't have a light, and as I was plunged into pitch darkness, I could hear three distinct voices giggling to themselves.

It was only as I turned to open it that I saw what was waiting for me.

Pinned to the inside of the door was a glow-in-the-dark paper skeleton.

You know the ones with those pale green bones that stand out in the gloom.

I froze, terrified.

I wanted to scream, but I choked it down.

I knew the reaction they wanted, and however close I might have been to a breakdown at that point, I was damned if I was going to give them the satisfaction.

Then something changed.

I don't know how to describe it exactly.

It was like the fear inside me, mixed with something, became something entirely new.

Not just inside me anymore.

I screamed when the skeleton began to peel itself off the door.

Its two-dimensional grin opened wide as its legs flailed, stretched, and spasmed, dancing like in those old cartoons.

And it reached out its arms towards me.

It couldn't have been more than ten seconds between my scream and when our boss Gene Pierce pulled the door open.

But apparently, my face was already covered in paper cuts.

So, yeah, I don't know how that fits into whatever system you use for these things.

It doesn't.

Anyone else clock when it turned into a statement?

What?

You think it's nearby?

I don't think so.

The squad has definitely been more eloquent since it arrived, but it seems to just be a general effect near the zone.

So far.

Hmm.

I'm guessing you didn't stay in that job much longer.

I tried, but my nerves were shot.

A week later, David pulled me into his office for the not everyone can handle the pressure talk, and I was encouraged to move on right out the door.

Anyway, the point is that, regardless of whether this archivist is John or not, it's not working the same as it did before.

I don't even know if it's quite the same as it was in my universe either.

What do you mean?

Well, for one thing, the eyeballs are new.

I'm wondering if this eye thing you have has changed it.

Had.

It's gone now.

Unless having another archivist changes that.

Well, shit.

Yeah.

So, given all that, if anyone wants out, now's the time, because either way, this is going to get messy.

I'm still in.

And it's not like I've got anywhere else to be.

You know, I can hear when you're all staring at me, right?

Obviously, I'm in.

I'll just leave the shooting to you guys.

Well,

okay, then.

So, does that mean I'll be getting a gun?

Because I haven't actually.

distributed by RustyQuill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International license.

The series is created by Jonathan Sims and Alexander J.

Newell and directed by Alexander J.

Newell.

This episode was written by Jonathan Sims and edited with additional materials by Alexander J.

Newell,

with vocal edits by Lo Rianne Davis, soundscaping by Tessa Vroom and mastering by Catherine Rinella with music by Sam Jones.

It featured Shahan Hamza as Samama Khalid,

Billy Hindle as Alice Dyer.

Sasha Sienna as Georgie Barker.

Lydia Nicholas as Melanie King.

The Magnus Protocol is produced by April Sumner with executive producers Alexander J.

Newell, Danny McDonough, Lynn C.

and Samantha F.

G.

Hamilton.

And associate producers Jordan L.

Hawke, Taylor Michaels, Nicole Perlman, Cetius DeRaven and Megan Nice.

To subscribe, view associated materials, or join our Patreon, visit rustyquill.com.

Rate and review us online, tweet us at TheRustyQuill, visit us on Facebook, or email us at mail at rustyquill.com.

Thanks for listening.

Hey, I'm Elise Hugh, host of the podcast TED Talks Daily.

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You could get lost in these hills.

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