fragment:target-audience-9

Link to article: fragment:target-audience-9.

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[[a class="style01-link" href="https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/target-audience/offset/8" target="_parent"]][[span class="style01-plaintext animation04" style="--content: 'Return to previous page';"]]Return to previous page[[/span]][[/a]]

----

[[=]]
[[span class="style04-plaintext animation03" style="--content: "Chapter 9";"]]Chapter 9[[/span]]
[[/=]]

As it turned out, the offer Vera had gotten from Synapse Consulting Partners was actually incredibly generous. Not only was she offered a higher position than was normal for new hires, but Synapse had promised to make any concessions necessary to ensure her comfort and assured her that they would respect her gender identity, name, and pronouns. While the latter wasn’t really all that relevant given that she wasn’t actually trans, she did appreciate the sentiment nonetheless.

And not only was Synapse willing to hire me on as well, but they assured us that I would be allowed to work in the same facility as Vera, and they helped me accelerate the process of resigning from Harvard. Though, I wasn’t entirely convinced that kind of thing wouldn’t burn all bridges I had built over the years, but then again, I wasn’t particularly concerned with that part of my life anymore.

No, what concerned me—terrified me—was Vera and I’s fate. Every single hour that passed between Vera accepting the job offer and our appointment with the recruiter felt like a torturous eternity. And the closer we got to the date of the appointment, the more I was filled with dread.

When the hour was finally at hand, Vera and I were standing in the foyer as we waited for the recruiter to arrive. And as I heard the sound of a car pulling up into our driveway, I started to breathe faster and faster, every heartbeat feeling as if it was ticking down towards our doom.

Vera then took my hand and gently squeezed it, helping me calm down somewhat.

Then, finally, the doorbell rang.

As discussed beforehand, Vera dematerialized and turned invisible to make sure that no one outside would be able to see her. I then went to open the door.

“Hello,” I greeted the man outside, who looked fairly unremarkable.

“Professor Bertram, I presume?” He asked.

“Yes, that’s right,” I replied. “Please come inside.”

As I closed the door behind him, he looked around and seemed somewhat confused. “Where’s Doctor Lovelace?”

“She’ll show up shortly, but first I’m going to have to ask you to brace yourself and to not be afraid,” I said in a well-practiced manner.

The recruiter furrowed his brow. “Why would I be afraid?”

I gestured for him to look to his left, and in an overly dramatic fashion, Vera then appeared in a puff of black smoke.

“Hi!” She greeted him in her usual chipper tone.

[[=image https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/local--files/target-audience/Lovelace_scene_9 style="width:600px;"]]

“Jesus, fuck!!!” The recruiter yelled as he recoiled away from her. He then looked at her and me in rapid succession. “Wh-what is this?! Some kind of ambush?!”

“Don’t be silly. What kind of ambushers would make an appointment with the one they intended to ambush?” Vera asked playfully as her tail swished from side to side.

“So… So you’re really…?”

“Doctor Vera Lovelace, in the flesh,” she replied, holding her head high. “Or whatever it is I’m made of. Not entirely sure about that one.”

“And… you’re the real deal?” The recruiter asked. “I mean, you’re the one who wrote the paper about hyperphasic materials?”

“Mm-hm,” she replied with a nod. “Along with two-hundred-eighty-six other papers.”

As the recruiter slowly got over his shock and disbelief, I couldn’t help but notice what seemed like a dawning realization that he had just hit the jackpot. “And… you want to work with us…?”

“I’d be delighted to,” Vera replied, her eyelids raised in a smile. “Provided that you still intend to honor your promise, that is.”

“Yeah… Yeah yeah, of course!” The recruiter responded. He then gestured towards the door. “I’m, uh, just going to step outside to call my superiors to see how to… proceed from here.”

“Alrighty,” Vera replied.

I then watched the recruiter awkwardly back away while staring at her as if she was a pot of gold that would cease to exist if he looked away. Once his back was against the door, he felt around for the knob, and when he found it, he opened the door and slipped outside.

Vera turned to me. “I think that went really well.”

“No, Vera, I have a really bad feeling about this. The way that guy looked at you…” I let out a sigh. “Come on, teleport us out of here. Let’s escape while we still can.”

“What, so we can hide in an even smaller cage?” She retorted. “It’s too late to run now, Huey. We just have to face whatever comes now.”

She was right, of course. There was no going back now, and that scared the hell out of me. I started to rub my elbows as my breath began to hasten.

Vera then hugged me from behind and nuzzled my cheek. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay. Whatever happens, we’ll face it together.”

She continued to comfort me as we waited for the recruiter to return, which he eventually did after about ten minutes.

“Alright, I’ve just talked to my superiors and they’re sending a… team to escort us to one of our major facilities.”

All of the alarm bells in my head went off upon hearing that. “Wait, I was under the impression that this was just going to be an interview.”

“Normally, it would be,” he replied. “What we typically do with prospective employees is to conduct multiple interviews before we finally bring them in. However, given what Vera is, we have to speed up that process.”

He was definitely hiding something and I knew it.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because now that we know about you, chances are that some other, more dangerous groups are going to know about you too,” he replied. The recruiter then looked into the dining room and said “What I’m about to tell you is going to be really heavy, so we should probably go sit down.”

“Okey dokey lokey,” Vera replied before teleporting to her usual seat at the end of the dining table.

As he watched her disappear and then reappear elsewhere in a puff of smoke, I noticed that the recruiter got a really odd expression on his face. It was the same kind of look my students got whenever they realized that they had forgotten to do their problem sets.

I took a mental note of it as I gestured for him to take a seat before I sat down opposite of Vera.

Once we were all seated, the recruiter folded his hands together.

“So first off, Synapse isn’t actually a real company—it’s a front for a secretive international organization called ‘the Foundation’, which is dedicated to the study of anomalies, such as you,” he said, gesturing to Vera.

She let out an excited gasp. “Are there others like me?”

“Well, I don’t know if there’s anyone that’s exactly like you. We have so many anomalies that it’s simply impossible for any one person to keep track of them all,” the recruiter replied. “But we do have quite a few sapient anomalies working for us.”

Vera wagged her tail as she turned to me. “You hear that, Huey? I could have coworkers that are like me!”

I, however, was not at all convinced by the benign picture he was painting. “If this Foundation of yours is studying anomalies, then that would imply that they are collecting them, correct?”

“Yes, that’s right,” the recruiter admitted. “And we do it not just to study them, but to keep them safe from groups and individuals who might seek to harm or misuse them. That and to protect humanity from dangerous anomalies.”

I narrowed my eyes. “And what do you consider to be ‘dangerous’?”

“Things that kill people or turn them into flesh-eating monsters. That kind of stuff,” he replied and then gestured at Vera. “We would not consider her to be dangerous, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“What I’m worried about is that you’re just feeding us a bunch of bullshit to make us go with you willingly, and that you’re going to put her in a box and throw away the key the first opportunity you get.”

“Come now, Huey, you know I could just teleport or phase through any box they put me in,” Vera said as if she wasn’t worried whatsoever.

“If they have a whole organization of scientists working on anomalous things, then chances are that they’ve developed countermeasures for that,” I pointed out and then stared down the recruiter. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Look, I understand that you don’t trust us, and I’m not sure what I can possibly say to convince you otherwise,” he replied, trying to come off as sincere. “However, I can tell you this—if Vera was human, she would be a top candidate for the research branch of our organization, but what she is and what she can do makes her even more valuable. She’s a one-in-a-trillion find, and given what we’re up against, it’d be incredibly stupid of us to lock her in a box instead of making use of her as a researcher.”

“And what //are// you up against?” I pressed.

“Things that would make your worst nightmares look like Disneyland,” the recruiter replied matter-of-factly. “Including a number of anomalies that could end the world. That kind of stuff.”

I stared at him, completely taken aback. As absurd and hyperbolic as it sounded, it was one of the only things he had said that was completely truthful, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

“Yeah, that’s usually the reaction I get whenever I mention that part,” the recruiter remarked.

I hated to admit it, but if this Foundation was really dealing with those kinds of stakes, then his logic was sound. Even so, I remained convinced that he was just trying to manipulate us into going with him willingly. There were definitely things he was keeping from us, and I just knew that this was going to end badly. I could feel it in my gut.

“I believe him,” Vera said with absolute confidence.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How could she not see that he was manipulating us?

Hoping that the recruiter didn’t know sign language, I signed to Vera “We must leave now! Before too late!”

She shook her head and signed back “Can’t turn back now.”

My breathing started to pick up as I realized that there was nothing I could say or do to change her mind.

The recruiter looked at his wristwatch. “My team should arrive in about twenty minutes. Why don’t you two pack whatever you’re going to need for the next couple of days.”

“Okey dokey lokey,” Vera replied before teleporting the two of us to the bedroom, making sure to put me on the edge of the bed so that I wouldn’t fall and hurt myself.

Now that we finally had some privacy, I took the opportunity to speak freely. “For gods’ sake Vera, I’m begging you—begging you—to reconsider!”

“We’ve already discussed this, Huey,” she said as she started to teleport our belongings into her pocket dimension. “I need this, and there’s no turning back now.”

I stood up. “Can’t you see that he’s just manipulating you to get you to come with him willingly?!”

“Well, duh. Of course he is,” she said with a shrug as she started to put away our clothes. “There’s obviously a bunch of stuff he’s not telling us, and if this ‘Foundation’ is dedicated to the study of anomalies, then of course it’s in his interest to make us go with him. However, he made a good point—who and what I am makes me far too valuable to not utilize as a researcher. And because of my particular talents, I’d be far more useful for working with experimentation and applied science, which is exactly what I want.”

“Perhaps…” I had to admit that her logic was sound. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be all fun and games.”

“I don’t expect it to be perfect, of course,” she replied as she finished putting away all of our things in the bedroom. She then teleported us into our home office and continued “But this is the one way for me to get what I want, if there’s a price I’ll have to pay for it, I’ll gladly do it.”

Her mind was completely set and there was nothing I could say or do to change it.

If I could, I would cry. “Our lives as we know them are about to come to an end, you do realize that, right?”

“I guess that’s the difference between us—where you see an end, I see a new beginning filled with possibilities.”

I let out a sigh of defeat. There was no use in arguing with her anymore.

[[=image https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/local--files/target-audience/Lovelace_scene_10 style="width:600px;"]]
[[=]]
----
@@ @@
++ [[a class="style05-link" href="https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/target-audience/offset/10" target="_parent"]][[span class="style05-plaintext animation02" style="--content: '“For ';"]]“For [[/span]][[span class="style05-plaintext animation02" style="--content: 'what ';"]]what [[/span]][[span class="style05-plaintext animation02" style="--content: 'it’s ';"]]it’s [[/span]][[span class="style05-plaintext animation02" style="--content: 'worth, ';"]]worth, [[/span]][[span class="style05-plaintext animation02" style="--content: 'I ';"]]I [[/span]][[span class="style05-plaintext animation02" style="--content: 'hope ';"]]hope [[/span]][[span class="style05-plaintext animation02" style="--content: 'you’re ';"]]you’re [[/span]][[span class="style05-plaintext animation02" style="--content: 'right.”';"]]right.”[[/span]][[/a]]
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fragment:target-audience-9

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