Property of Professor Pock

	In the place where things go to be gone, a shimmering crack parted the air, and accompanied by a sound like the tearing of fabric, Warlock Professor Pock's automaton squeezed awkwardly into reality. It fell several meters headfirst into a tangled heap of Halloween decorations. The crack in the air receded into oblivion as the automaton climbed to its feet, joints of metal twisting to yank false cobwebs and plastic vampire bats from around its neck. There was a small paragraph of text carved onto the inside of its forearm:


PROPERTY OF PROF. SOLGUS POCK.
IF FOUND, PLEASE RETURN TO INHABITED SPACE-TIME, PLANET URTH, WYVERN PROVINCE, CASTLE HAVOC, TOWER OF MARIONETTES.
CHEERS.

	The automaton had, in a fit of inspiration, been named Mr. Discovery. Mr. Discovery was in the Plane of Garbage.
	Mr. Discovery turned his head slowly around fully 360 degrees, scanning the surroundings. He was standing upon a desolate plain, flatter than parchment at the surface and yet littered as far as the artificial eye could see with the assorted leavings of humanity. There were hills of trash sprawling out in every direction comprised of everything from forgotten furniture to festering food. There was an entire section of tiled wall underfoot. Mr. Discovery stepped aside to revealed a mural depicting all twelve of the original founding Wolf-Tongue Counselors, though the cracked and grime-encrusted ceramic artwork betrayed its age without the inclusion of Thirteenth and Fourteenth Counselors Hurr and Mowr.
	The sky was lit unnaturally, as there was not a star to be seen. Mr. Discovery confirmed that nothing in this realm had a shadow, himself included, and yet the piles of trash glowed faintly in the haze of high noon. The ground beneath the trash was surprisingly visible for the incalculable amount of raw junk that must have been deposited here over hundreds of years. Mr. Discovery knelt down to the barren gray dirt and sifted through dry dust with his mechanical fingers. He found that while his fingers could part a shallow layer of trash topsoil, what lay underneath was seemingly impregnable to even his wizardry-enhanced digits. It was not stone or metal or anything Mr. Discovery could match to the known matter stored in his databanks, but he did not possess the tools to probe deeper. Besides, this was merely a curiosity and far from the objective of this expedition.
	Mr. Discovery stood and began to carry out the primary method with which he would explore the Plane; starting from here, he would walk in precise concentric circles, widening his radius with each completed circle. In this way, he would scan the landscape for the item he had been sent to collect. Professor Pock had chosen a rather rudimentary spell with which to animate Mr. Discovery, instead trading for the benefit of a self-sustaining magical energy source. Mr. Discovery would never tire and never fail. He would continue to spiral outwards into the potentially infinite until finding the target, at which point he would activate each teleportation rune covering his chassis, in order of weakest to most powerful, until or unless one of them happened to actually work. There was no failsafe and no backup plan, for this was the extent of magical knowledge on the subject of the Plane of Garbage. Nothing and no one had ever returned after being sent away. The Professor had hoped that with the latest runes and a guiding program, Mr. Discovery might be the first to do so.

	It was 363 years later that Professor Pock was accidentally killed in a freak alchemical fire. No one would ever witness Mr. Discovery miraculously springing back into his tower with a crack and a tear, clutching the prize in a dusty metal palm, the glint of data recorded from that realm of refuse poking through the foggy lenses of his glass eyes. Such a thing never occurred. Nothing and no one would ever come back from that place, and as such there would forever be a place on the Professor's shelf lying in wait for his signed copy of 1,050 Shades of the Grey: A Comprehensive Guide to the Netherveil and What Lies Beyond.