OMN64: Steve’s Self-Filling Buckets

Location: All known instances ‘gifted’ through the mail by ‘Steve’, which is an entity of unknown origin.

Status: Active.

Description and Behavior: Steve’s Self-Filling Buckets are anomalous four-gallon (15 liter) steel buckets with cheap paper sticker labels on them, usually with ‘Steve’s Bucket’ written on them with permanent marker. The inside of each bucket is lined with a pink, rubber-like substance with equally spaced pores. When these buckets are received in the mail, they come accompanied with a short letter from ‘Steve’. Attempts to locate this Steve have so far failed, as the return addresses often lead to foreclosed homes. The letter is as follows:

Dear [insert recipient’s name],

How are you doing? I am writing you today to congratulate you on receiving my fabulous present. This bucket will be able to alleviate the stress of your day-to-day life, a necessity considering your debilitating mortal condition. It is the solution to all your most relevant problems as it is a fully automatic bucket! The ways in which this will help you are literally UNIMAGINABLE. No need to thank me.

Yours truly,

Steve

Unfortunately for those who receive this letter, it is largely unhelpful in understanding the bucket they just received. Every instance of Steve’s Self-Filling Buckets has the anomalous ability to ‘pull’ liquids towards itself to fill itself to the rim. It typically does this after being empty for about an hour and draws the liquid from the nearest ‘easy’ source of liquid. Once the bucket is filled, the pores on the inside will suck in the liquid to empty the bucket. It is unknown what happens to the liquid. Filling the bucket manually with liquid can prevent it from attempting to fill itself. Putting in any solids will cause the bucket to immediately expulse it.

There are circumstances where the ‘easy’ source of liquid is in fact a person or animal. The bucket will pull the blood, sweat, oils, cerebrospinal fluid, and various other bodily fluids through every orifice of the body so as to fill itself. This is always fatal. The bucket can even attempt to acquire liquid from inside the box it arrives in, provided it can dislodge the polystyrene foam ball wedged inside of it.

Recommended Actions: If you are a recipient of one of Steve’s Self-Filling Buckets, please do your best to dispose of it quickly and safely. While throwing it into the ocean or other similar large body of water may seem like an effective solution, doing so without properly weighing it down can cause it to wash back to shore and be acquire by someone unaware of the danger. If no substantial body of water exists near you, a possible solution is to dedicate a faucet or hose to filling it constantly. Do not attempt to destroy the bucket. A failed experiment on an instance of these buckets demonstrated that destroying a Self-Filling Bucket results in it constantly attempting to fill itself, likely due to a malfunction in its ‘self-awareness’. Four researchers died in the incident.