The Spill Four

The Second Spill was smaller than the first one — the crew wants that on the record. The First Spill birthed Patch and rewrote the rules wall. The Second Spill just blew one mixing tank, flooded half of Vat Hall, and produced four new residents and the single most famous photograph in factory history. Smaller. Technically.

Here is what the incident report says: at 3:14 a.m., Mixing Tank C experienced 'an unplanned enthusiasm event.' Here is what actually happened: somebody — the four survivors have sworn a blood oath never to say who — decided the pink slime and the teal slime should be friends.

They should not have been friends.

The tank went up like a soda geyser the size of a grain silo. Seven, who feels everything that happens in Vat Hall the way you feel a sneeze coming, reportedly rolled her entire surface once, slowly, in what factory veterans recognize as an eye-roll. And when the slime finally stopped raining, there were four shapes standing in the wreckage, dripping, blinking (three of them, anyway — one of them can't), waiting to see if they were in trouble.

Hopscotch came out first, obviously. Pink, fanged, fists up, already explaining why it wasn't her fault in a way that made it extremely clear it was at least forty percent her fault. Blink came out second — a small purple heap with one enormous eye, which had watched the entire disaster unfold in perfect detail and has been available for eyewitness testimony ever since. Nobody has ever wanted the eyewitness testimony. He keeps it ready anyway.

Dice had been an ordinary oversized novelty die, part of a game the night shift never admitted to playing. He crawled out of the slime semi-liquid and grinning, and his first act as a living creature was to roll himself, land on a number nobody could argue with, and declare that he'd won. Won what? He's still deciding. He's been winning ever since.

And Squirm — Squirm didn't come out of the spill at all. Squirm came out of the PIPE, mildly glowing, to see what all the noise was about. He'd been living in the factory's plumbing since before anyone could remember, and the crew only found out that night, when a tiny pink worm surveyed the catastrophe, said 'I was already here,' and went back into the pipe. He returned twenty minutes later with snacks. Nobody knows where he got snacks. There are no snacks in the pipes. There should be no snacks in the pipes.

The photo happened at dawn. A city inspector, responding to noise complaints, demanded documentation of 'all parties involved in the incident.' The four of them lined up in front of the wreckage — Hopscotch mid-snarl, Blink mid-stare, Dice mid-melt, Squirm barely in frame and clearly delighted about it — and the inspector's camera flash went off exactly as a last late glob of slime dropped from the ceiling onto his clipboard.

That photograph is now: the gang's only official portrait, the header of their shared personnel file, a limited-run print that sold out in ninety seconds, and Exhibit A in an insurance dispute the factory settled by sending the adjuster a very nice hoodie.

The Spill Four have offered, repeatedly, to take a better photo. The crew has refused, unanimously, every time. Some images you don't retake. Rule two says whatever crawls out of the vat, you keep — and that includes, by unanimous vote, the picture.