He checks the clock in his suit's HUD.

"I have tee time in thirteen minutes. Care to discuss this more while golfing?"

Score! Potentially in more ways than one, assuming this is a person and not an android. Maybe even then, Elliot's not picky. She gives him a thumbs-up and sits back, satisfied.

That seems to mark the end of the interesting questions. Morgan has a few herself, but at this point she just wants to collect Kelsey's delivery and leave. She waits in her seat until people start trickling out, then gets up and approaches the podium.

"I'm with Sentry," she says, opting for 'bored' rather than 'impatient'.

He nods.

"One moment, please."

He retrieves an incongruously rustic leather bag from somewhere on his person and dumps its contents on the podium: a sheaf of papers, two fist-sized gemstones, something that looks a bit like a Star Trek phaser, and a bundle of Falcon tubes held together with rubber bands are the first things to tumble out. He offers her the tubes.

"Twelve doses of super soldier serum, Abraham Erskine's original recipe. I have the package insert here as well…"

He plunges his arm into the bag, well beyond where the bottom ought to be, groping blindly.

"Didn't you say performance-enhancing drugs were, uh…?"

"'Super soldier serum' is both a misnomer and a common misconception," he says, still rummaging through the bag. "It's actually a radiation hormesis agent, invented in 1942 as a prophylactic against fallout from nuclear war."

"Where did the misconception come from?"

"What would happen to an ordinary man exposed to a massive dose of ionizing radiation? A man deliberately exposed to nitramene gas, or an unshielded man blasted with a thousand sieverts of gamma rays from a nuclear weapon, or a man injected with a venom gland's worth of polonium-210?"

"Those all sound like fantastic ways to die slowly and painfully."

"Modern problems require modern solutions."

He pulls out a folded sheet of paper, tucks it into the elastic band on the Falcon tubes, and leaves without further elaboration. Doctor Mantle follows him out.

The package insert helpfully informs her that this drug is incredibly toxic and should only be administered in anticipation of acute radiation poisoning. Common side effects are indistinguishable from radiation poisoning; the list of uncommon side effects is five pages long and written in painfully small font.

So, reading between the lines, this is a potentially-anomalous drug that temporarily renders you immune to radioactive waste in exchange for spinning the roulette wheel of bizarre outcomes. Not a bad idea if this is somehow mundane – most things are better than acute radiation poisoning – but it's looking more likely that Kelsey was just lying when she said this was a regular chemical. The name 'super soldier serum' should've been a clue, in retrospect.

Morgan is hit with the temptation to flush it all down the toilet and claim that she and Kelsey never met up, but the way today is going she's worried it'll turn this golf course into a Superfund site haunted by giant sewer reptiles before she's safely back in Arizona.

She pockets the drug samples and goes to the cloakroom.

It is a beautiful day at Celestial Greens, and few of the horrible people here wore anything heavier than a summer windbreaker. The cloakroom is nevertheless jam-packed with their luggage. A disconcerting number of the bags and suitcases stacked against the walls have biohazard symbols and fire diamonds taped to their exteriors, to say nothing of the cages holding live animals.

An attendant wearing the same black tie uniform as the woman who handled registration watches Morgan impassively as she hunts for the briefcase, his eyes hidden behind dark shades.

It's at the back of the room, naturally. The thing she's looking for is the cell phone holstered in a charger on the side, a modified Foundation-issue Nokia 3310 (the internals are factory standard but the phone's reputed indestructibility has been enhanced from figurative to literal). They've got a miniature base station running in the office building on the other side of the door for her, which is how Morgan plans to vent her spleen request an update on the mission objectives before visiting the next mad scientist on the list.

"Can you take my briefcase up to room 301?" she asks the staff on the way out. No reason to leave it out here in public.

"Yes," he says, after a prolonged pause. He lifts the briefcase as though its substantial bulk is nothing to him and leaves with it, giving the impression that he has only recently learned how to walk using only two legs.

The Nokia's display shows no signal.

Moderately alarming. It's possible that radio waves can't travel through the doorway between worlds, but if that were the case she'd expect them to move the base station to this side and hide it behind the utility shed once her microphone cut out. Maybe the building is blocking the signal?

She goes outside, pointedly staring at her useless phone so as to give the (accurate) impression that she does not care to be roped into any ongoing conversations, even ones that would not make a bioethicist weep.

It is gloriously sunny; perfect weather for golfing. The hill on which Celestial Greens sits has a commanding view of an eighteen-hole course, surrounded by sparkling blue waters that fade into the distance in all directions. There is no signal until she makes it a few feet further away from the door, at which point she suddenly has four bars and the phone starts ringing.

"Upsilon-2, this is Waller,"  she answers, not bothering to hide the fact that she is both annoyed and scared. "Looks like there was a network outage—"

"Negative, your wire has been broadcasting continuously since you left Sedona. We started the call about ten minutes ago, only noticed there was a problem when you reached your phone and we couldn't hear the ring – I'll have one of the technicians look into what caused the delay, it's probably on our end. The chief pharmacist at Site-101 says you're supposed to… meet up with one of our guys in there?"

The fact that the MTF commander is phrasing it as a question and not a statement does not fill Morgan with confidence.

"Affirmative; I have the sitrep from Oliphant," she grumbles. "By the way, during your little chat with Vihaan, did you happen to get ANY-FUCKING-THING relevant to my mission from this CRITICAL UPDATE to which I was SOMEHOW NOT PARTY? Such as, for instance, details on the ALTERNATE FUCKING DIMENSION I blithely walked into with EFFECTIVELY ZERO INFORMATION?"

"We asked. The Pharmaceutical Department keeps records on the conference you're attending. They're unclassified, but none of them came up when we searched for Celestial Greens on the mainframe."

Because, Morgan realizes belatedly, the conference is held in a different location every year. The SCP doesn't reference Celestial Greens because the two haven't been associated before. The earliest anyone could've put the pieces together was when she read the name of the golf course off the pamphlet on the way in, at which point her Nokia was not only in another room but also having technical difficulties.

The fact that this isn't anyone's fault in particular takes most of the wind out of her sails. It's almost impossible for her to whip herself into a frothy rage over mistakes that can't rectified, since screaming at the uncaring cosmos as it doles out misfortune is much less productive than screaming at insufficiently careful employees before they can invite death and destruction into her lab.

She sighs heavily, feeling deflated. "Take the procurement list he gave you and run it by the HMCL supervisor. I have another thing to go to."

"Ma'am, the HMCL supe is just going to assign us a hazardous waste containment team."

Gosh, a HAZMAT team? What a distressingly predictable consequence of due diligence that would be.

"Do it anyways. Have someone read through the Pharmaceutical Department's containment procedures and text me if there are any instances of Foundation personnel dying or resigning within four months of visiting one of these places. Waller out."

She hangs up before he can get a word in edgewise. This weekend's grocery run is going straight to an analysis lab in a sealed neoprene bag, and no one whose primary qualification for this line of work involves firearms is going to contradict her.