Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s Friendly Floatees Bath Toys

Origin
In 1992, a shipment of plastic Friendly Floatees bath toys spilled out from its cargo ship and into the Pacific Ocean. Consisting of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles and green frogs. Ten months later in November that same year, the first Floatees began to wash up on the Alaskan coast. At that point, oceanography researcher Curtis Ebbsemeyer picked up on the phenomenon and was tracking the movement of the bath toys. With such a large amount of flotsam, researchers had a fuller picture of the currents that moved them across the oceans.

The animals floated to Washington State, up through the Bering Strait and into the ice-locked Arctic. They stayed there for five to six years until the ice receded enough, where mass quantities started appearing in the Atlantic in 2004. By 2007, many were making landfall on the British Isles, 15 years after they first went adrift. Bleached by sun and seawater, the ducks and beavers had faded to white, but the turtles and frogs had kept their original colors.

Effects
When they contact water, they multiply into nine more copies of themselves. Each original can only multiply once and furthermore, none of the copies can duplicate. However, when several hundred of the collected animals are exposed to water at once, things can get messy pretty quick. Also, they seem to be extremely reactive to moving fluids and currents. In layman’s terms, whenever there is movement like the flow of a river or a mild breeze, the animals are easily picked up and transported along that current.

Trivia
Nobody had told Pete about the artifact’s properties when he was re-shelving them. With a childlike mentality, he found a bathtub and started tossing them in their for fun. Unfortunately, he also had Rube Goldberg’s Styling Pencil and a portable electric fan with him. Said artifact activated and 350 plastic bath animals started to float upwards over the stacks and across the Warehouse. Pete was unable to neutralize them, so agents still find random ducks and turtles on the shelves.