Special Delivery

[Narrator]

A couple days after Tosh's online sleuthing and chatting there is a huge wooden shipping crate sitting in the workshop, addressed to him. It's easily three feet tall and about four feet on each side. Clearly hand-written red letters mark it as 'Top Secret'.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Upon hearing it arrived, Tosh went to the workshop to check out his package straight away.

"Okay that's a big package alright," he observed.
Phrasing.

And then went to find a crowbar.

"Please don't be just a bunch of random crap," he said before getting to work opening it.

[Narrator]

He pries the box open and after pulling away some packing material he finds... what looks like a bunch of random crap. They do seem to be labelled at least. And there's a stack of stapled together paper that lists what each item is. In case Tosh wasn't able to determine the obvious meaning behind, say, a piece of rock.

Tuft of fur - piece of yeti hide, DNA analysis?
Piece of pottery - symbols relate to ancient contact with aliens, carbon dating?
Irradiated rock found near meteor site - space radiation? possibly planted by government agents?
Recording of lights in night-sky - spectral analysis? confirm validity?
Soil sample #32 - check for radiation? precipitation from chem trails?
Water sample #24 [tap] - fluoride levels? mind control substance?
Water sample #13 [public fountain]
Water sample #29 [river]
Metal fragment #4 - missed by government cleanup, piece of experimental plane?

And so on. It seems Tosh has made a friend with a lot of shit he gathered over the years. Analyzing all this stuff is going to take forever should he actually decide to do it. At least some of it he can just determine with handheld scanners, but other things are more complex.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Ugh. The hell have I gotten myself into?" he groaned as he thought about what, if anything, was potentially relevant. He decided to start with analyzing the rock. Cobaltic had mentioned getting his cell sample from such a rock.

[Narrator]

A quick scan of the rock shows that it is, well, a rock. Made of mineral deposits and such. It does seem to contain more radiation that normal background. Not dangerous levels, mind you, but more than a regular piece of stone you'd pick up from the ground. Looking a little closer at the chemical make-up and it seems this is indeed the fragment of a meteor of some kind. It's radioactive signature tells Tosh it must have passed through the atmosphere and landed on Earth somewhere between 50 and 100 years ago.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Well it's kinda neat at least," he admitted to himself. He decided he was unlikely to find anything useful and moved on to the metal fragment.

[Narrator]

It's a piece of metal! Scanning it's composition reveals nothing out of the ordinary, just an alloy of various things that, on second glance, looks familiar. He'd seen the same composition before somewhere...

[Toshiro Narumi]

He perked up and hurried to compare it to his findings on the time disc.

[Narrator]

Yup, same composition. Of course this wasn't necessarily a rare mix of alloys and this could just be a coincidence.

[Toshiro Narumi]

He checked for signs of contact with a singularity such as the one that seemed to power the time disc.

[Narrator]

There are no signs of any significant time distortion on the metal.

[Toshiro Narumi]

He'd have to go through the list, removing obvious junk like dubious photos and water samples first then do a basic analysis to rule out the less obvious junk and hope something else jumped out. He would prioritize anything related to the lizard people theory as well as locating genetic material and matter affected by temporal distortion. But first, he compared the rock's composition to the metal, in case he had overlooked a connection.

[Narrator]

No connection to be found. Although some thing popped into his head. Hadn't Cobaltic said that the meteor this is supposed to be from came down only a couple years ago? The piece of space-rock came down much longer ago, according to his readings.

[Toshiro Narumi]

He decided to ask Cobaltic about the discrepancy.

The meteorite fragment you sent me, how did you acquire it again? My findings say it came down somewhere between 50 and 100 years ago. I'd also like more info on the origin of metal fragment #4.

[Narrator]

Yes! I knew it!
Found both combing through the woods where people say they saw "meteor" come down with metal detector
claimed bits were from it but you say they much older confirms they try to trick us
drop fake rocks around to cover up plane exploding

[Toshiro Narumi]

Is anything else you sent me from that site?

[Narrator]

some stuff
others from around the world, I collect things, people send it to me
should be some soil, water and air samples from around town
only found things that got scattered
tried getting closer but for weeks they had whole area of woods blocked
tried sneaking in but always got spotted by weird government agents

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh made a mental note to include the soil and water samples from the town.

Weird how?

[Narrator]

just weird
body language and all, just weird
odd names too, the one talked to me said her name was Business Mandy

[Toshiro Narumi]

Business Mandy?
♫Drink my wine.♫
Secret Asian... Holy mondegreens, Sharkman.

He did a web search for "Islands Industries misheard lyrics" and groaned at the results. Though as clues go, it didn't seem particularly helpful. But he searched for "mondegreen conspiracy" anyway.

[Narrator]

After a bunch of digging he finds some harebrained thing about lyrics being engineered to be easily misheard as some form of subtle mind-control. It seems rather ridiculous, even considering the circumstances.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Well, I guess finding their villain theme isn't entirely useless information," he mused.

Thanks. You've helped me improve my research plan.

FYI, Business Mandy is a misheard lyric from "All Along the Watchtower". They are, at the very least, music dorks.

He proceeded with his plan of attack.

[Narrator]

Scanning the samples reveals very little. They're exactly what you'd expect them to be composition-wise. They certainly don't contain anything unusual. There's Fluoride in the tap water, but that's to be expected.

[Toshiro Narumi]

He moved on to looking for genetic material, beginning with the fur to get it out of the way.

[Narrator]

And thus begins the long arduous process of genetically analyzing bits of old fur. And at the end of it Tosh has proven that this definitely came from a deer. The soil and water samples are even worse, because especially the soil is teeming with genetic material from microorganisms. Unless he has something specific to look for the only conclusive answer is that there is indeed a lot of genetic amterial in your average handful of dirt.

[Toshiro Narumi]

He was beginning to suspect that anything but the rock and metal was thoroughly irrelevant nonsense. He decided then he needed a break.

---An unspecified period of time later---

Mentally refreshed, Tosh went back to work by trying to discover if any of those microorganisms didn't belong in a sample from that area or were subjected to exotic radiation. It would take awhile.

[Narrator]

It's over a week later and it still feels like Tosh has made little headway. There's just so much useless and outright stupid stuff to comb through that it becomes hard to stay thorough, especially when he's not entirely sure what he's looking for in the first place. But then, finally, in one of the soil samples his tests produce something out of the range of expected results. Entertaining Cobaltic's claims was starting to look ridiculous, in this case he was convinced that the government had tried some kind of marker introduced into the drinking water by means of chemtrails in order to track people, but of course the water samples, when exposed to UV-light, did fuck-all in terms of actually fluorescing. Instead, the sample next to it, one of the soil samples from near Chelyabinsk, began to glow, indicating some kind of unusual dye-molecule present.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh raised a curious brow at the soil sample and immediately abandoned his current task to pass the light over it.

"Finally! About damn time something happened."

He happily brought it under the microscope for a closer look.

[Narrator]

Lots and lots of dirt, but then he hits a clump of what must be dried blood. A lot of the cells in it are dead and look rather strange, but they were preserved relatively well by being frozen in the ground. With some effort he might be able to separate out all the dirt and get an actual blood sample.

It takes some careful dissolving in water and various steps of centrifuging and filtering, but finally he manages to extract all the dirt and other bits, leaving him with a small vial of... well he thought it was blood under the microscope, but having reconstituted it makes it clear why it reacted strangely under the UV light. The blood he has in the vial is bright green.

[Toshiro Narumi]

He had finally hit paydirt... in actual dirt even! And it looked liked he had enough material to run through the DNA sampler this time around. To cover all bases, he included the X-Men archives in his search for matches in said test and image comparison of the 'blood' under magnification.

[Narrator]

The iamge comparison pulls up very little. Broadening the criteria he starts getting hits for amphibians, mainly due to the coloration, suggesting the blood functions significantly different than that of humans. It would be easy to write it off as some kind of strange animal sample if it wasn't for the DNA analysis. To start with, he has some serious trouble getting it to run properly. The sequencing is incredibly janky and keeps spitting out errors such as "Wrong base-pair coding" and about a third of the results of the sequence are just filled with questionmarks where it failed to produce a measurable result. It's almost too consistent to be an error though, almost as if whatever DNA he has here has an additional basepair. The chunks of sequences he does get bring up minor matches from all over the place. Most of the reptilian from public databases, but the largest alignments are from the X-Men database, namely a couple of shapeshifter DNA that have a couple of matching areas. None of these can really be considered matches at all under normal circumstances, the main results still being that this doesn't really fit any existing thing he can find and according to how evolution works should not exist on Earth.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Shapeshifting... aliens? Holy shit it really is... no, I need verification some... how..." he asked himself, trailing off as he recalled having more than one experienced X-Man to ask. He left immediately, Bruce humming the X-Files theme.