Containment Breach

"No one was messing around in there? Then don't tell me the Misaka Sisters just vanished on their own." Luo Yifang felt utterly terrible. Was their efficiency too high, or was their competence too low?

"You might not believe this," Busu Dixin said, her tone carrying a strange undertone, "but the Misaka Sisters really did disappear inside the laboratory."

"Huh?" Luo Yifang said in surprise. "Are you sure?"

"It was the incubation chamber before the experiment. The Sisters would all enter that chamber for their final adjustments before the experiment, and ever since last week, every Sister who entered it has disappeared." Busu Dixin gave an answer that was impossible to believe.

"What the hell?" Luo Yifang felt certain he had misheard. "Are the researchers over there all useless? Something goes missing in their own house and they don't even notice?"

"How would I know? I'm not in charge of that work," Busu Dixin said, rubbing her temples. Ever since meeting Luo Yifang, she had felt as though the world around her had begun to fall apart. "And who would've thought there was something wrong with the incubation chamber door?!"

Just as Luo Yifang was about to make a snide remark, Paqi interrupted him. "Let her continue."

Luo Yifang blinked. Though he did not understand what Paqi was after, he still pressed Busu Dixin. "What kind of problem? Explain it carefully."

"I'm not entirely sure, but we discovered that as long as something passes through that door into the sealed incubation chamber, it disappears. Yet the cameras installed inside the chamber can't detect anything unusual," Busu Dixin said. "The researchers at the institute have already started arguing over it. They even brought in specialized robots to investigate, but the signal cuts off the instant the robot enters the chamber door."

"That strange?" Luo Yifang was interested now. Could this be some kind of bizarre incident after all?

"They're arguing over whether to invite relevant experts to inspect it. Some even want to find an esper with spatial abilities to try." Busu Dixin held her forehead. That door capable of swallowing everything had genuinely shocked her.

After hanging up, Luo Yifang thought for a moment and asked Paqi, "Do you think it's just a door?"

"No idea. I haven't seen it in person, and based on the description alone, too many things fit. Pre-inscribed teleportation arrays, targeted teleportation devices, overlapping spaces, and so on. Plenty of possibilities match what that purple-haired girl said." Paqi sighed. She had just been searching through the incidents recorded in the [Book of Ten Thousand Worlds] that matched the description, but at that rate, she feared it would take several hundred years to finish.

"Then how about we go take a look ourselves?" Luo Yifang asked.

"Do you know where that laboratory is?"

"No," Luo Yifang said bluntly. "But a little program I made earlier calculated Busu Dixin's usual routes and gave me some approximate coordinates. It's still much better than searching blindly like before."

Paqi looked at Luo Yifang as if he were a pervert. "When did you do that?"

"Huh? The day she passed out, I made a little program and planted it in her phone." Luo Yifang smiled innocently. Busu Dixin was unwilling to tell him everything. At the very least, she had brushed off the laboratory's location with excuses like not knowing it herself and the Misaka Sisters' safety not being guaranteed. But was Luo Yifang the kind of person who would waste time arguing with her?

Without further delay, Luo Yifang immediately headed toward the laboratory's location. After conducting a large-scale search, he finally found the laboratory within the known area. Using the same old methods—light distortion, heat masking, and a series of concealment techniques—even if someone bumped right into him, they would not notice his existence, much less any cameras.

Luo Yifang easily evaded everyone's notice and reached the Misaka Sisters' storage room without the slightest effort. Unfortunately, the people here had apparently been afraid of more disappearances occurring and had already evacuated every Misaka Sister. Though he had guessed they might take that step, Luo Yifang had still come here with the mindset that there was no harm in taking a look.

Fine, then he would go straight to that bizarre incubation chamber! He passed unobstructed through the various researchers and arrived near the incubation chamber, which had already been sealed off. He asked Paqi, "Do you know what that thing is?"

"What the fuck is wrong with you? How am I supposed to know from that far away?!" Paqi looked at the distance of at least several dozen meters between Luo Yifang and the incubation chamber, nearly spitting out a mouthful of water. "I'm part of the [Book of Ten Thousand Worlds], not a scanner. I can already tell this place is haunted."

O_o You can't do it from this close either? Fine, looks like I'll have to get closer. Luo Yifang wondered what was going on now. Were those researchers still discussing this strange thing, or were they still having a shouting match in the conference room? There was not a single living person beside the incubation chamber. So Luo Yifang walked up to the chamber door and said to Paqi, "Is this close enough?"

Paqi glanced at it, then at Luo Yifang, and said speechlessly, "You really are one hell of a weirdo. You can run into something like this too."

"How is this related to me again?" Luo Yifang refused to take the blame.

"I told you before, didn't I? The changes in this world are related to you, and things from outside entering this world have even more to do with you," Paqi said, rolling her eyes at him. "You're definitely taking the blame for this one."

Luo Yifang's mouth twitched. There was something he did not know whether he should say.

"You know the SCP Foundation, right?" Paqi ignored Luo Yifang's state of mind and began explaining on her own. "The world where the SCP Foundation truly exists is extremely bizarre. If another world gains an extra article about an SCP, that world gains an equally bizarre anomalous object that refuses to follow any rules of science or magic. If I were one of that Foundation's higher-ups and learned about this, I would absolutely find a way to throw those increasingly bizarre anomalous objects into other worlds."

"Uh..." Luo Yifang suddenly remembered that he seemed to have written a few nonsensical SCP articles himself.

"This thing in front of you is one of the strangest of the strange," Paqi explained. "But its ability is quite useful—at least for you. With this thing, what we need to do next will become much easier."

"As long as it isn't something like SCP-173. I wonder if those Sisters who got swallowed can still come back..."

"They can definitely come back, but that depends on luck," Paqi said. "Look up SCP-4972. Its appearance is indefinite. When it attaches itself to a wall or some place that can provide it with a fixed anchor point, it automatically takes on a form that can be treated as a 'door.' It can be a wooden door, a glass door, an iron door, or even a hole. The 'door' randomly leads to another world, and once you enter it, you cannot pass through that door again for one month."

"This must be the thing the Foundation's higher-ups dream of getting their hands on..."

If you can't find a book by its title, try searching for the author—it might have just been renamed!