After scouting the entire city, I only found one of the anomalies close enough to a manhole that I felt comfortable going down. Just to be sure no one would ask questions, I ran back to my apartment to change into more robust clothes and to throw some fresh clothes and a bucket of water into my [warehouse] before stopping by a construction site to borrow a full complement of high-vis jacket, hardhat, boots, gloves, and some cones.

Getting the 110lb cover off was an ordeal that required covering a long stick in many layers of each of my polymers and some [Improvised] buffs just to make sure it didn’t snap in half. It was very sketchy, but the extra leverage combined with a little extra kinetic energy creation let me tilt the cover up and roll-shove it out of place. [Act] definitely helped the few people who meandered by with ignoring my improvised tool and atypical build for a person doing something like this.

All in all, the process took almost an hour and a half, during which the anomaly moved about a foot closer to where I was entering.

The cameras making up my eyes started to show their limits as the low light conditions made them almost useless with how grainy my vision was. Since I normally didn’t need light, I had forgotten to source a flashlight, and I hadn’t replaced my phone since I put it out of commission. Even worse, the anomaly wasn’t popping up anymore since I was apparently too close- leaving only my manual position marking from earlier to guide me. 

The stench and by extension taste of the tunnel might have been overwhelming, but at the first whiff, I turned off both of those senses. The texture of what I was crawling through was still awful and made me extremely thankful I wasn’t claustrophobic or particularly squeamish with this sort of thing. When I had inched my way the three-ish feet to from the entrance to where the anomaly was marked, I realized that if it actually existed, it would be under the waterline.

A few sweeps back and forth with my hand eventually hit something squishy, but also surprisingly firmly attached to the floor like an oversized sewer-limpet. A few more slightly harder knocks, and it suddenly became dislodged and partially lit up to my ULE perception and danger marking.

Not wanting to spend any more time down there, I grabbed the soccer ball sized object and reverse-shimmied my way back. When there was finally enough light to see again, I quickly realized I was holding a pulsating, fleshy mound that looked eerily like a demon. It wasn’t that much worse than the environment I had found it in, and despite plenty of opportunities hadn’t attacked me, so I only momentarily considered dousing it in fire before my curiosity won out.

Cleo must have been of a similar mind to me as they recommended, {you should put that away quickly before anyone notices. Then we need to take a careful look at it.}

Nodding, and with the knowledge no one was around the hole I was at the bottom of, I tossed it up and out before scurrying up the ladder. As soon as I was back on the surface, I grabbed the flesh orb and beelined to the closest door, opening an imaginary entrance to my [warehouse].

There was a brief moment of consideration of whether I should ruin my sponge-bath water by putting it in the bucket before I simply placed it in the middle of the space. I figured with how slow it had moved before, I was safe to quickly clean up my normal-space mess without it doing anything- after getting the sewer-gunk off me of course.

While I was out, with some help from Cleo, I bought supplies to help me safely and cleanly dissect the demon. This mostly consisted of an extra few buckets, some large glass containers, a set of sharp knives, various types of cleaners, elbow length gloves, and some other miscellaneous implements.

The urgency in Cleo’s voice as they pushed me to finish my macabre prepwork prompted me to ask, “why don’t I just report the issue to whoever’s in charge. Its ability to evade ULE perception does have me concerned, but why do all this myself?”

Sounding a little disturbed for the first time since I met them Cleo bluntly replied, {is there anyone that you would trust with the knowledge demons have had free range on this island for who knows how long? I don’t quite understand humans, but I do know two things: individuals are unpredictable and groups default to panic and chaos when put under threat.}

A little confused by their behavior, I clarified, “so, you’re saying that the only way to maintain control over the situation is to carefully limit who even knows about it?”

{What do you think would be the worst outcome if this got out?}

The paranoid and twitchy part of my brain had already considered about a dozen ways this could end badly, so I easily answered, “the government, civilians, and MGs each have different ideas about what should be done. The island is locked down and all information is suppressed, everyone is confined to their houses. The general population either learns the issue and freaks out trying to escape an undefined threat or gets more scared by seemingly authoritarian demands and a lack of information. MGs either on their own or in groups take sides, culminating in someone doing something stupid…”

{That's one possible outcome, yes. And if anyone reputable catches wind of the discovery, it's only a matter of time until something like that- or worse- happens.}

Catching something in their tone, I dug a little deeper, “it sounds like you’re talking from experience, has something like this happened before?”

Cleo didn’t reply for a few seconds, and just as I was starting to ask again, they carefully offered, {...in other invasions in other universes, this event has been mirrored, with a few outcomes- which one happens here will depend on what we find from the dissection… Can I ask you to do that, then I’ll tell you as much as you want; you are not immune to irrational decisions based on the possibility the situation is worse than it actually is.}

“So you want me to just go along with this while having information withheld?”

{...Yes. Think about it this way: you discover a strange lump on your body. The vast majority of the time the result will be that it is not actually a major issue, however, there’s a slight chance it's cancer and a smaller chance that cancer is in an advanced stage. While much better than a few decades ago, most treatments for cancer still take a heavy toll on your body, so it’s best for a doctor to run tests and confidently identify the real issue before potentially very harmful treatment is started.}

With a frustrated sigh I relented, “alright, I trust you. But- however tame the result, I want to know what the cancer equivalent for this is when we’re done.”

{Thank you.}

Pushing down my growing paranoia, I deposited the last item- a stainless folding table- into the pile I had been acquiring over the past few hours. By now it was getting into the evening and I had set up an improvised operating room in one of the corners of the [warehouse], complete with plastic curtains held up on PVC pipes. The actual dissection would be performed after training tomorrow, so after briefly admiring how my efforts looked like a back-alley organ harvesting operation, I popped the lid off the bucket I had deposited the demon in.

It hadn’t moved since I put it in there: just sitting in a pool of shallow water at the bottom. Satisfied, I hammered the lid back on, made sure the holes I had drilled in it were too small for it to escape, then put the bucket under the vision of a camera, which coincidentally was also the middle of a ring of claymore mines I had acquired from the all-you-can-take warehouse where I Kay had helped me get some starter equipment.

My recent spending sprees have cut into my most easily accessible truly private bank account. There was still a good amount of funds in it, but spending any amount of money made me nervous. On the bright side, having an untraceable connection to someone else’s server made remedying those problems quite easy. After I had added a few layers of publicly available proxies and VPNs, I sold some of the crypto I had bought during a brief and regrettable phase of anarcho-capitalism funded by an intense theft spree.

Now I was much more mature and stuck to an adult’s pursuits of espionage, personal information theft, and the acquisition of shiny things that no one would miss. It didn’t pay as much since I wasn’t selling what I found- but then again, if I wasn’t so inclined towards paranoia, I would have just stolen from the taxpayers and made SEYA pay for everything at this point.