SCP-458:
The Never-Ending Pizza Box
AFTER BLINKING several times, it dawned on me that I was on unfamiliar ground. The air—the smell and taste of it—was completely different from before. Up until now, my surroundings had been filled with the dusty, musty odor unique to decrepit buildings. After all, I was in the dilapidated ruins of a library.
Without any form of air conditioning on hand, simply being inside the humid library in the heat of summer made me work up a sweat. But now I felt strangely cold. To the point I was getting goosebumps, even. The smell drifting in the air reminded me of the poignant stench of medicine in hospitals.
In fact, the room was cramped, like a hospital room. It had gray concrete walls just like the ones I occasionally saw in the background of the photos of that girl. Although they were clean, the floor, walls, and ceiling were all that same boring gray.
A bare light bulb hung from the ceiling. Next to me was a small stand, like the ones people kept landline phones on. For some odd reason, an antique brooch that looked like it might have archeological value had been thoughtlessly dumped on its surface.
Strangely, I didn’t notice any doors or windows. It felt more like I was in a box than a room. Stuck in this cubical room, the wild idea that I’d somehow managed to travel inside the photo hit me.
Vision reeling, I crumbled to the ground. As if on cue, the book with the photo slipped out of my hands and clattered across the floor. I saw now that the title of the worn book was Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. I’d never read it before, so I wasn’t totally sure what it was about.
Stranger still: the photo I was holding along with the book vanished, as if it was nothing more than an illusion, a figment of a dream. In its stead, the girl stood before me.
“██████?” she asked, in something that sounded like English, although I couldn’t say for certain.
Dang, it really was the Girl in the Photos… The pictures were always either headshots or three-quarter shots, so this was my first time getting a full view of her. As suspected, she was a perfectly normal human without so much as an inch of mystique. She was a young foreigner, around the same age as me. Loosely hanging hair spread around and over her shoulders. Her eyes were big and round. She was wearing plain clothes, socks with cute cartoonish bears printed on them, and fluffy slippers. She continued to cradle the clunky camera as if it were a stuffed animal, looking down at me with a troubled expression on her face.
“███, ██████? ██████?” It seemed like the girl was asking me something out of concern. But I still couldn’t make out what she was saying. I couldn’t understand her. Although she was probably speaking in English, the real deal was nothing like what was taught at school. Even if I knew the grammar, I couldn’t hold my own in a conversation.
Honestly, it didn’t help that my head was a jumbled mess, either. I doubted I could give her a decent answer even if she started talking to me in good ol’ Japanese. My mind reeling, I looked like a goldfish, flapping my mouth open and shut. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on!
As if prompted by the sight of me in such a sorry state, she kindly offered me her hand. My back had given out on me, after all. Gingerly grabbing her fingertips, I could feel her body heat. I knew exactly how normal people felt, and she felt no different.
“Who are you?” the girl asked in a slow, clear voice, carefully punctuating each word.
Hooray for junior high-level English! Even I could understand that! She was asking who I was. But seriously, that was what I wanted to ask her.
In any case, I was somewhat relieved by her rather friendly disposition, so I decided to go ahead and introduce myself. I was planning a pathetic attempt at communicating by mustering all of the English vocabulary I knew, but before I could—
Someone whacked me with all their might on the back of the head. I swiftly fell unconscious.