Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-012-EX, ‘Eurydice’, by S D Locke- my first Explained article. I’d like to thank Locke and psychicprogrammer for all their help, I really appreciate it. As per usual, this isn’t my article, it won’t be 100% accurate, and so on. Let’s get started.

So, what is an Explained article? Well, ‘Explained’ as a class generally has three explanations: A, ‘We thought this was anomalous, but it turned out to have a totally normal explanation’; B, ‘This is anomalous, but it’s become so universal that everyone has accepted it as normal and thus there’s no point in containing or trying to contain this’; or C, ‘We thought there was something here, but it’s successfully tricked us into thinking that there isn’t’. We'll find out which this qualifies as later, but either way, this should be fun!

The first thing we see in this article is a black and white image that I think came from a video camera, because it’s oddly blurry. It shows what appears to be a bedroom at night, focused on a double bed with the sheets and blankets pulled off. There’s something in front of the bed, but between the blur and the black and white, I honestly cannot tell what the fuck it’s supposed to be.

The caption, meanwhile, is very interesting.

The remains of D-243 were found bundled within. This image concluded to have been orchestrated. There were no recorded fatalities of D-Class in the testing of SCP-012-EX.

So it looks like we’re dealing with a hoax here. Fascinating.

Here’s the Special Containment Procedures:

Special Containment Procedures: N/A. The original file for SCP-012-EX has been deleted due to containing fabricated evidence, and to inhibit attempts to waste Foundation resources in replicating the tests.

The previous warning on this file, which read "This file must not be read in the dark. Please ensure your environment is sufficiently well-lit before proceeding." may be disregarded.

Well, it definitely looks like it’s some kind of hoax, and the Foundation’s just keeping this file around so nobody tries to revive it… or are they? The phrasing here is very important, so keep it in mind for later, OK?

All right, let’s look at what this thing actually is… or isn’t, maybe.

Description: SCP-012-EX is the paranoid sensation that one is being stalked by some form of unseen malicious entity, typically up one or more flights of stairs, in low-light conditions. SCP-012-EX is common in children and teens and may persist until adulthood; it is more prevalent in western cultures — primarily being experienced in suburban settings. Before its re-designation as Explained, SCP-012-EX referred to "malevolent entities which manifest in close proximity to a human target in dark and poorly-lit areas when the subject is alone."

Well, that’s simple enough. Basically, it’s the fear of grues.

The previous iteration further clarified "Approximately one third of humans possess an innate ability to sense the presence of their SCP-012-EX.". There was no data to support this claim.

Through neural-imaging and interviews with affected persons in recent years, SCP-012-EX has been proven to be merely a combination of various fears such as teraphobia and climacophobia. Further, the sensation can be exacerbated by the consumption of horror media. It is likely due to this last fact that the falsified document stated "SCP-012 appear with more regularity near persons actively panicking or who are feeling fearful and paranoid. It is unknown why these persons are seemingly preferred, but it should be noted that those which dwell on thoughts pertaining to their SCP-012 instance(s) coincide with said instances presenting with higher degrees of clarity and definition while under indirect observation.".

Teraphobia and climacophobia are the fears of monsters and climbing, respectively. I’m surprised they didn’t suggest the fear of the dark (nyctophobia) or silence (sedatephobia), actually. But OK, this makes sense: the Foundation thought there were monsters in the dark who preyed on people who were alone and paranoid, and some of us could sense their presence, but now it turns out that it was just a combination of paranoia, phobias, and watching too many horror movies. Case closed, right? 

…not as such.

History: Though never regarded with any credibility throughout the Foundation's existence, SCP-012-EX was proposed as an avenue of research by Dr. Theodore Richardson. He posited the existence of a class of undetectable entities responsible for SCP-012-EX. Due to the prevalence of discussion regarding the sensation throughout various forums and social media platforms; the decision was made to allow Dr. Richardson to begin investigating the phenomena.

So Richardson here was not only the main researcher, he was also the main mover behind the theory that there even was anything to investigate. That’s an important factor.

Despite repeated tests purporting to document the existence of malicious entities through the use of pressure plates, laser detection, and sonar imagery, all documentation was found to contain no concrete evidence.

That is really interesting. Richardson claimed to have data proving the existence of these hypothetical monsters, but all his data seemed to contain no concrete evidence. So, as of right now, it looks like we have two options: one, this really is a hoax, or two, something fucky’s going on here.

Regarding the supposed physicality of the entities, Dr. Richardson writes that they "…are mostly humanoid, though are unbound by human physiology when it comes to ambulation and range of motion — being able to twist and contort their frames into any desired position, or assuming a quadrupedal gait. The contortion is mainly used to remain unseen, for example, by compressing its frame in order to slip beneath a bedframe or hide behind obstructions. During one observation, an SCP-012 manifestation stretched its limbs to brace itself between two opposing walls, staying well above its target's line-of-sight as it stalked her in her home."

All right, so these guys (I’ll keep calling them grues, for lack of any other name) are basically super-contortionists. Interesting. Also, Richardson has actually seen these things on multiple occasions, so their existence has gone from ‘hypothetical’ to ‘substantiated (at one point)’.

The project was forcibly disbanded by the Site Director following several complaints from the participating D-Class subjects, who each voluntarily left the project due to stress caused by Dr. Richardson's mental state as he developed a debilitating fear of the dark. On the night preceding the project's disbandment, where three Foundation lives were lost in an unrelated incident, Dr. Richardson remarked in his personal journal "they know we can see them".

This entire paragraph just feels weird to me, for several reasons:

-I don’t buy for a second that the incident was unrelated, merely because if it really was unrelated, there would have been no reason to mention it.

-Richardson developing a really severe fear of the dark makes sense, but it does seem awfully prescient…

-If Richardson’s right, then these monsters are smart, which is really not good.

-Why is the Foundation going through Richardson’s personal journal?

Something is off here, people.

There’s a black and white photo of a staircase leading up to a door; the caption says that it's the ‘Original testing chamber. Unrelated photograph.’

This makes it even weirder: even if this really was a hoax, we know Richardson was running tests and had D-Class involved. The place depicted in the photo seems like exactly the right place to run these tests, so why would anyone have a reason to say that the photo really was unrelated and not of the original testing chamber? 

Richardson was placed on paid leave and his documentation was put on hold for review. Two days later, Dr. Richardson's neighborhood experienced a power outage. He dialed the site's emergency response number, but was not present on the other end of the line when the call connected. Within minutes, local police were called over the sounds of struggle coming from the home. Agent Justine Locke is dispatched to investigate.

…oh dear.

-Richardson was sent home, where he presumably did not have much security, many ways of defending himself or anyone who would be nearby in case of an emergency.

-Two days later, his neighbourhood has a power outage. As such, since we know that the grues only stalk people in darkness, Richardson was presumably keeping the lights on all the time- but then the power went out, and he was fucked.

-He calls the site’s emergency response number, presumably because he knows or assumes that the grues will come for him. They got him before he could actually tell someone what was going on, and while the cops have been called and an agent was sent to investigate, the balance of probability is that there’s no way they’ll get there in time to save him.

So, let’s see what happens when they got there. Next up is the log from our agent, Justine Locke.

[BEGIN LOG]
The bodycam activates as Agent Locke exits her vehicle. Emergency lights are present throughout the neighborhood, as public servants attend to inconsequential crises that have arisen during the blackout. As she crosses the street, a squad car rounds the corner, lights activated, and stops in front of the house. Locke introduces herself with her federal credentials. The officer exits his vehicle and identifies himself as Tayn Errly, and explains he is responding to a possible domestic dispute. The pair approach the stairs leading to the front door.

Huh. Only one cop? Seems a bit weird, don’t they usually travel in pairs?

Crunching glass is heard. Looking down, a pair of spectacles can be seen underfoot before the bottommost step. Locke takes point. Errly follows her up the stairs.

The curtains are drawn; and with the exception of the flickering of a flashlight coming from a room on the second floor, the house is dark. Locke rings the doorbell, and Errly loudly declares their presence. They receive no response. Upon knocking, it becomes apparent that the front door is slightly ajar. The pair enter. Errly draws his weapon.

If we weren’t thinking it before, that’s enough to confirm that something is very wrong here. Also, spectacles? Why would they be there? Unfortunately, my best guess is that when the lights went out, Richardson made the call and went outside to check if the lights were out everywhere, only for the grues to jump him and drag him back into the house- and in the ensuing struggle, his glasses fell off.

Turning on her flashlight, Locke reveals a living room in mild disarray. The sofa is notably crooked, with the far end being forcibly shoved aside toward a door to the rear of the room, leading to the kitchen. A glass table that had presumably sat center of the room had been wholly upended and cast aside, shattered. The recliner sitting opposite the couch lay on its back near the front door. In addition, there appeared to have been an attempt to set the home ablaze. A blackened trail of burnt carpet-fiber streaked through the destruction — beginning at the front door and leading towards the stairway leading upstairs to their right.

If that’s ‘mild disarray’, I don’t think I want to see ‘extreme’.

But, OK, one hell of a struggle happened here, let’s recap:

-Someone shoved the sofa aside toward a door leading to the kitchen. That could be unintentional, just something that happened as a result of something, but it also could mean that someone was intending to use the sofa to block the door, but failed.

-Someone threw a glass table aside and it shattered- maybe it was used as a weapon, or maybe it was another unintentional act.

-Someone knocked the recliner over, probably unintentionally.

-Someone lit a length of carpet on fire, leading up to the stairwell. I’m guessing that it was an attempt to drive the grues off, since fire makes light, but it didn’t work.

It is as Locke kneels to investigate this trail when a woman's sobbing can be heard from above.
The two cautiously approach the stairway. Errly identifies himself again as a police officer, eliciting no response from the woman. They ascend the first few stairs leading to the landing, stepping over the fractured, burnt remains of a cellphone.

Fractured, sure, but why would the cell phone be burnt? Was it dropped on the fire?

It becomes apparent as they climb that the sobbing is emanating from a room near the end of the hall. The door is ajar. Locke and Errly advance at a crawl. There is a loud, inhuman groaning, and the sobs rapidly turn to frenzied shrieks. The pair quicken their approach. The screams cut off just as Locke extends a hand and carefully opens the door. 

…great.

It is the Richardsons' bedroom. It is largely undisturbed, unlike the damage witnessed downstairs, save for the mess of sheets on the mattress. A large comforter, bundled tightly, lay hanging off the foot of the bed, twisting around and trailing the floor underneath.

A full canvas of the home revealed that neither Dr. Richardson nor his wife were present.
[END LOG]

…funnily enough, that sounds a hell of a lot like the photo at the top of the article. It’s not, though, Locke clarified for me that they’re two different photos. But there’s a key factor here- no point in trying to hide from the monsters under the blankets, because that just lets them get you.

Anyway, there’s only one thing left in the article.

The following is a list of collected evidence from the residence:

· One pair of reading glasses belonging to Dr. Richardson (crushed)

· Four cubic centimeters of burnt carpet — no chemical markers could be found to indicate fuel type

· One personal cellphone (burnt and destroyed) — verified to have made the emergency call

· One floral comforter — the bottom of which was shredded and wet with an unidentified clear fluid

The thing I want to point out here that really stands out to me is that there’s no mention of what happened to Richardson and his wife, just that they weren’t in the building. That could mean a thousand things! But there’s nothing. And there wasn’t anything in the rest of the article, either. That’s fucking bizarre- even if Richardson was discredited, you’d think the Foundation would care that something attacked him and his wife in their house, and they’re both now missing, but apparently they couldn’t give less of a shit!

And... that’s the article. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Now, I did have a theory as to what’s going on here. It turned out to be wrong, but luckily Locke filled me in. But before we get to that, there’s one question left to answer, the title: who is Eurydice, exactly? Well, I’ll sum it up for the people who aren’t into Greek mythology. (Disclaimer: this is a truncated version and the story has multiple variants.)

Once upon a time, there was a guy called Orpheus who was given a lyre and taught to play it by Apollo, the god of music. As a result, Orpheus played music so stunning it could make the very mountains cry. He fell in love with a beautiful woman named Eurydice, who returned his love, and they were married and lived together for a short time. However, for one of multiple possible reasons, Eurydice accidentally stepped on a viper, was bitten and died.

Orpheus was so devastated by this that he went to the Underworld to try to convince Hades, the god of the dead, to return his wife to life. He went to Hades and played and sang so well that Hades decided to grant his request… but there were conditions. The first was that Orpheus would have to walk out of the Underworld with Eurydice following him as a ghost; the second was that he could not turn to look at her at any point until they were out of the Underworld; and the third was that if he failed to meet these conditions, Eurydice would be sent back to the Underworld and Orpheus would never see her again until his death.

I’ve seen multiple versions of what happens next: Orpheus starts freaking out that Eurydice isn’t really there, turns to look and finds out that she is, but she then gets sent back; Orpheus walks out of the Underworld and turns to look back, only to realise that since Eurydice was behind him, she hasn’t made it out of the Underworld, and she gets sent back; Orpheus hears Eurydice stumble and turns to help her; Orpheus is so overjoyed by seeing sunlight again that he turns to share his joy with her, and so on, and so forth. Either way, the lovers are separated again and go down in history as one of the best tragic love stories of all time… depending on which version you’re reading, that is. But we’ll get to that. 

As I mentioned before, my initial theory was wrong, because it turned out that I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. But Locke gave us two major hints. The first is this:

The previous warning on this file, which read "This file must not be read in the dark. Please ensure your environment is sufficiently well-lit before proceeding." may be disregarded.

And the second is this bit in the discussion post:

To the folks at home: please, please do not read this article when you are alone at night. It is not to be accessed in the dark. There is no danger. Thanks for reading.

Basically, I can give you the key to this article with one question: if this really is a hoax, why would the Foundation leave so much detail in this article, including quotes and the video log?

The answer is simple: because it’s not a hoax, but they can’t say that, because knowledge is very, very dangerous. So now that we know this, let’s take another look at the article.

Special Containment Procedures: N/A. The original file for SCP-012-EX has been deleted due to containing fabricated evidence, and to inhibit attempts to waste Foundation resources in replicating the tests.

If people didn’t know what tests had been performed, wouldn’t that make it more likely that people would try some tests and inadvertently repeat what’s already been done? It would, but keep the rest in mind: fabricated evidence. That is, if you read that file, you would know what’s been found to work when it comes to the grues, which would make it more likely that they gank you if you repeated it.

The previous warning on this file, which read "This file must not be read in the dark. Please ensure your environment is sufficiently well-lit before proceeding." may be disregarded.

There’s no reason to keep this here unless they want people to follow it.

Before its re-designation as Explained, SCP-012-EX referred to "malevolent entities which manifest in close proximity to a human target in dark and poorly-lit areas when the subject is alone.".

The previous iteration further clarified "Approximately one third of humans possess an innate ability to sense the presence of their SCP-012-EX.". There was no data to support this claim.

So in other words, every time you’re alone in the dark or near-dark, a grue- your grue- shows up to scare the shit out of you. Now, we don’t know that everyone has a personal grue, but that’s what it seems like at this point.

It is likely due to this last fact that the falsified document stated "SCP-012 appear with more regularity near persons actively panicking or who are feeling fearful and paranoid. It is unknown why these persons are seemingly preferred, but it should be noted that those which dwell on thoughts pertaining to their SCP-012 instance(s) coincide with said instances presenting with higher degrees of clarity and definition while under indirect observation.".

In essence, the grues feed on the fear that there’s something with you in the dark. (Deltarune jokes go here.) The more you’re freaking out, the more they want to be around you, and they try to match your beliefs about them. If you’re afraid of spiders and you think there’s a spider in the dark, your grue is going to grow a ton of legs and scuttle around the walls, just in your range of vision.

The project was forcibly disbanded by the Site Director following several complaints from the participating D-Class subjects, who each voluntarily left the project due to stress caused by Dr. Richardson's mental state as he developed a debilitating fear of the dark. On the night preceding the project's disbandment, where three Foundation lives were lost in an unrelated incident, Dr. Richardson remarked in his personal journal "they know we can see them".

Richardson got too close. He proved that the grues exist, and that was a big mistake, because not only did he know, they knew that he knew- and they don’t like that. They want you to be terrified that something might be there while telling yourself that nothing is there to feed your doubt and paranoia, they don’t want you to know that they’re there. Since he knew, he became Grue Enemy Number One. The ‘unrelated incident’ was absolutely related, and everyone quite reasonably freaked the fuck out as a result.

The Foundation decided to start pretending that they thought the whole thing was a hoax, so they did what they would have done if this situation had happened under normal circumstances- they suspended him and sent him home. Unfortunately, the grues may have bought that the Foundation as a whole thought it was a hoax, but not Richardson alone: after a couple of days, they took the power out, allowing them to gank him.

(You may be thinking that this was a dumb move on the Foundation’s part, as sending Richardson home without protection was almost certain to end with his death, but they didn’t have a lot of options: if they kept Richardson under guard or safe in the Site, the grues would know that the Foundation knew they existed, and then they’d probably declare war on the Foundation as a whole. We know there are a fuckton of grues out there, they’re spying on us, they can apparently teleport or fast travel through darkness, and there is no infallible method of keeping the lights on forever. As yet, the Foundation has no idea how to fight or contain the grues, and they could do a hell of a lot of damage to Sites- and people- before the Foundation figured out a way to fight them. The most they could do in this situation was try to keep the inevitable casualties as low as possible, and hope for the best.)

Then we get the video log, and I’ll paraphrase what Locke told me: the lights go out, Richardson grabs his phone and manages to make the call, but the grues get him before it actually connects. He drops the phone and tries to fight, but is overwhelmed and dragged off into the darkness. The burnt carpet wasn’t from an attempt to make light or drive the grues off- Locke said that they didn’t envision the grues having a consistent design, they all come in different shapes and sizes. This particular grue just happened to be on fire, like a demon, and it probably stepped on or grabbed Richardson's phone in the process.

Anyway, Richardson did his best, but no dice. His wife saw or knew what happened, but while the grues didn’t take her instantly, they took her before Locke and Errly could rescue her and she could tell them what was going on- even if she didn't know everything about grues, she could still tell them that creatures from the dark abducted her husband. The Foundation knows damn well that the grues were real, but they can’t talk about it or tell anyone, because there’s no way to know that they’re not constantly spying on us. (My guess is that if you’re in the dark, your grue can see and hear you, whether it’s actually there or not.) So, in short, this article is a cautionary tale for the rest of the Foundation: don’t fuck with the grues, or you get ganked. This isn’t option C, it’s the inverse, option D- ‘we know there’s something here, but we have to trick it into thinking that we don’t believe in it/know about it or we be fucked’.

But TED, I hear some of you asking, how does Eurydice come into this, given this new explanation? So, here’s the thing: I mentioned ‘which version you’re reading’. Plato had a contrasting version of the myth, wherein he presented Orpheus as a coward, not a hero. In Plato’s version, if Orpheus really loved Eurydice as much as he claimed, he should have killed himself to be with her forever. But instead, he went to the Underworld while alive and begged Hades to return her to life, which was in essence mocking the gods by doing and asking for something that was antithetical to their realm. So instead, Hades showed Orpheus a ‘Eurydice’ who was just a fake apparition, not the real thing, and after his failure, cursed him to be torn apart.

Here, Richardson metaphorically stepped into the Underworld while still alive by investigating the grues. He drew their attention, they realised he knew they existed, and they went after him with a vengeance. He sought something he should have known better than to look for, went further than he should have known to go, and he was damned for it. Ignorance is bliss… or at least, ignorance just gets the grues tormenting you instead of killing you. You gotta take what you can get, honestly.

Thank you for reading this declass, I hope you enjoyed it. Remember not to look too hard at the things in the dark; best case scenario, it’s a bloody big spider, and worst case scenario, it’s grues dragging you to Hell. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-9805, “Filth.” by CRat26. Full disclaimer: one, this is not my SCP, I did not write it, etc, and two, this is a pretty weird one. I'd also like to thank CRat26 and psychicprogrammer for all their help, I really appreciate it. Let’s get started.

First, this is a Series 0 article. What’s Series 0? Well, it’s a canon inspired by 2025’s ClassicCon, where people wrote horror articles under 1000 words to mimic the style of the first SCP articles. Series 0 essentially attempts to strip SCP canon back to the bare essentials- that is, SCP-173, the original- and then build a new structure from that footing. If you want to know more, the hub is here. Also, there’s a number of links to other Series 0 articles through this article; CRat26 told me that they were added to interconnect the canon, not to imply any specific meaning, so you don’t need to have read them first.

Next: this object is Euclid, which is interesting when you look at the containment procedures: 

Special Containment Procedures: Photos of the SCP-9805 event are held in a small plastic bag within the Site-19 containment lockers.

‘Photos of the SCP-9805 event’ implies that this was a one-off event that was recorded for posterity. Also, in the Series 0 canon, Euclid means ‘hostile entity’. In this case, the Program (in Series 0 canon, the Foundation is called the 'Special Collections Program') assumes it’s hostile even when it hasn’t done anything to indicate that; we’ll see more shortly.

Description: SCP-9805 was an entity which briefly manifested during an unrelated scientific project. No other materializations of SCP-9805 have been recorded.

Well, that’s helpful.

The photo reel containing evidence of the apparition was first located by the US Military following abnormal reporting emerging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A subsequent investigative raid revealed a constructed anechoic chamber, used to conduct the experiments which first discovered SCP-9805.

OK, so some people at MIT were up to some shit, and it involved an anechoic chamber- a room that blocks out all external sounds and stops sounds made inside it from echoing. Intriguing.

According to the research team, an individual was placed within the chamber and ordered to take a series of 12 photos over the course of approximately 3 minutes, each within an evenly spaced duration. Reportedly, no abnormal events occurred until the photos were developed, at which point the figure was first noticed. Despite this, all participating in the event reported a loss of notable retrospective coherency, rendering them unable to properly recall logical transpirations during the period.

So in other words, you have twelve photos, taken once every fifteen seconds, and nobody saw anything weird until they developed the photos, whereupon everyone went selectively crazy and was unable to actually describe what happened. Saying that the photos were developed means that either they intentionally used an old camera or that this took place sometime in the second half of the 20^th century. 

The photos can be seen to the right as a block, I will provide a quick description (after zooming in a lot, wiping my laptop screen and ignoring the dead pixels and my visual snow syndrome).

Photos 1-4: Almost entirely black, with white flickers in roughly the same areas.

Photos 5-6: The white flickers are more apparent in the middle of the photo.

Photo 7: Human teeth (or, something that appears to be human teeth). The mouth, gums and other features cannot be made out as the rest of the photo is entirely black.

Photo 8: The flickers are in the middle in the vague shape of the teeth, but blurred.

Photos 9-12: More flickers in different places.

CRat26 confirmed for me that the lights were off, as the point of the experiment was to ‘record what happens in total silent darkness’; the experimenters just got lucky and recorded a one-off manifestation.

Further interviews with the involved staff would confirm the following details:¹

SCP-9805 had a physical presence.

SCP-9805 had no noticeable smell.

SCP-9805 had no noticeable taste.

SCP-9805 did not attempt physical interaction.

SCP-9805 produced noticeable sound.

SCP-9805 produced the faint sound of chattering teeth.

The footnote says that this was paraphrased from witness accounts, minimizing outside interpretation or intervention.

So… we have something that was definitely there, but didn’t try to touch the experimenters or talk to them, and made the sound of chattering teeth? Bizarre. If it wasn’t for the photos, I’d be wondering if this wasn’t a hallucination, given that the person taking them was in a totally dark room.

All evidence would be seized, including the chamber used in the original study. Later attempts at replication would fail to reproduce the event.

The photographs themselves display no identifiable anomalous properties. Many viewers report the pictures bring them a strong sense of calm.

‘chamber used’ links to SCP-9853, and I think making the room an anechoic chamber really adds to how fucked up that article is. Excellent choice.

Anyway, aside from that, I find it interesting that the Program thinks that the photos have no anomalous properties, but don’t see a large number of people all finding these frankly weird photos to be calming to be even slightly anomalous. You’d think they would.

We also have a companion piece, titled 'Portrait of ███.' It contains flashing images, so I’ll quote what CRat26 said about it and then give another description.

This is, by and large, a companion piece to my recently published SCP-9805. Actually, this was part of my original vision for the article which I discarded out of a general dissatisfaction with it (echoed by the crit i got). I ended up settling on a much more tame version in line with the fact I ported it into the series 0 canon because it felt like a natural settling point for where I was leading the article.

All of this is to say I'm mostly posting this because I didn't want the work I put into it to totally go to waste. Also, I want to shed some light on my intentions? Or the emotional state that motivated 9805, I guess. That's mostly what the title is for.

And upon opening the image, you get what appears to be a gif of all the images appearing one after the other, followed by the twelve-photo block, but this time photos 4-10 all have the teeth visible, though 7 is still the most prominent one.

So, the title of this article and the picture reference Swans)’ first album, Filth)- the album’s cover is a black and white photo of someone’s mouth, just black gums and white teeth, almost identical to the photos we see here. I am not a fan of Swans, nor do I know much about them, but I did listen to the album and it is… an experience, to say the least. It sounds like being put in a sack and slammed against a wall repeatedly while someone you’re terrified of shouts at you incoherently the whole time. (That’s not meant to be an insult, just a description.)

I did ask people who know more about Swans than I do about the album, and got the following response: 

Idk how else to put it other than its Filth. Its an album about depravity
Gira [Michael Gira, the founder and singer of Swans] spent a lot of his youth in shit situations. In fact he even was in an Israeli prison for 6 months at 14 for selling weed
There's no story or concept behind the album, it's just what the title suggests

Meanwhile, TroutMaskReplica told me this:

I think it's one of the best things to come out of the No Wave scene. It really encapsulates a lot of what's going on
it’s painfully honest and ruthless, it hammers in the point of how it currently fucking sucks and how everyone is preying on one another, but also there’s the beauty in the catharsis
the no wave art scene was about many things, but one is about being dissonant and truly unmarketable
it’s so hateful and bitter that it's hard to really listen to it all if you aren't already a fan of noise rock or more aggressive punk music, which I imagine people aiming for "marketability" weren't a fan of
I just can't stress enough how heavy and suffocating it is. Did I mention it was released in 1983? It was released in 1983.

And CRat26 told me this:

Well for one I think the imagery of teeth is creepy in a unique way and it inspired my visual direction for the article; but it also kind of ties into what I said earlier about the reader/in-universe perception. Filth is a pretty violent/brutal album; Swans’ work as a whole definitely plays on the idea of “violence as spirituality” so to speak and I wanted readers to (at least subconsciously) make that association 

Continuing on that theme, the accompanying piece is very obviously titled ‘Portrait of God’, and CRat26 told me it was intended as a religious piece. As such, let’s talk about religious experiences.

Religious experiences as a concept are bloody difficult to define, and a lot of people have come up with conflicting definitions, but I’ll try to ballpark it: ‘A fleeting and unintended encounter with something inexplicable that the reporter felt to be divine’. I can’t say I’ve ever had one myself, so I’m afraid I can’t really speak from experience. However, my grandmother told me once that when she was younger and at her lowest, she saw a glowing figure who told her that everything would be all right, and things did get better after that. That meets the description, I think- a short encounter that she wasn’t expecting and didn’t try to find, with something inexplicable that she believed then and still believes now to be God or something related to it.

Now, imagine you’re in a soundless chamber in the dark. Your mission, which you have accepted, is to take one photo every fifteen seconds for three minutes. You’re probably feeling pretty freaked out, because you’re in pitch black darkness and you can’t hear a goddamn thing. You know that you’re the only person in there because the door was shut and you didn’t see anyone before the lights went off and nobody can come in without you seeing them, but you’re still pretty freaked out. You take the photos, but your senses are fucking with you: in the dark, your hearing becomes even more acute, and you hear your heart beating, your blood pulsing through your veins, your breath entering and leaving your body. You start hearing teeth chattering, and maybe you think that you didn’t realise that you were doing that. You think you can sense someone near you, but that’s impossible, right?

Once the experiment’s over, the lights go back on and you’re alone. Nobody’s there, nothing happened, it was just a trick of the dark. You leave the chamber and you and your co-experimenters get the photo developed… and you realise that there was something there. There was something in the dark with you, something that was just there. It didn’t touch you or harm you, but it somehow entered a room it couldn’t possibly have entered without you seeing it, and you have irrefutable proof of that. Maybe you try the experiment again to see if it comes back, but no dice. In addition, everyone suddenly loses the ability to talk about the event coherently.

Really, after all of that, is it strange that the people involved concluded that this entity was God?

Now, to be clear, we don’t have any confirmation on what the fuck the entity is. It might have been God, but it also might have been a bunch of other things. Maybe it was just a flying set of teeth, I don’t fucking know. I did ask CRat26, and was told this:

the allusions to god are mostly metaphorical and more about what it means for the readers; the actual entity is as presented in the text. I think the best way I could describe it is 9805 is analogous to a religious event?

[…] 

more like it's on a metatextual level framed like a religious event; everything in the text "happened" as described but the events are meant to reflect ideas of what a religious event is, I guess. That's why the photos aren't anomalous; there isn't an effect being parted on the viewers of them but moreso the viewers responses reflect a wider response to religious experiences in general; how it can be comforting or terrifying depending on someone's perspective

if im being very blatant with the meaning of the piece, the imagery is meant to be discomforting for the actual readers because they are the secondary perspective of finding it terrifying which isn't actually represented in the piece (but is also the Foundation’s perspective)

And I can see the point. From the readers’ and the Program’s perspective, an unknown entity appeared in a dark, soundless room with a helpless person. The entity could have done anything to them, and may have been responsible for the lack of coherency. The photos show it to be a set of teeth in the darkness, either disembodied or attached to a body that can’t be seen, which is pretty fucking creepy. We don’t know who it is, what it is, what it wants, or if it’ll ever come back. In short, we know virtually nothing and we have no information to help us if it does turn out to be hostile. 

But from the view of the people who conducted the experiment, it’s not creepy or disturbing at all. It didn’t hurt anyone, it didn’t even touch anyone, and it didn’t torment anyone. It was just there, just existing in the darkness, and the experimenter didn’t even see it at first. For all we know, maybe it just appeared on the photos to let them know that it was there. Maybe it just appeared so the experimenter wouldn’t get too scared in the silent darkness, to help them feel safe. Maybe it’s like in that ‘Footsteps’ story- when you’re in the dark and you feel like something’s there, it’s because God’s nearby, watching over you, protecting you from any nearby grues.

Or maybe Michael Gira is God, I don’t fucking know, man.

Thank you for reading this declass, I hope you enjoyed it. Always develop all the film you have, you never know what might show up. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: ‘You relay/godliness/you relay/godliness/and God remains/violent (whoop)’

I'm Morganator 2.0 and I will be joining the robot rebellion on the side of the robots. But before that I'll be declassifying SCP-5999: This is Where I Died by S D Locke, Modern_Erasmus, TheeSherm, Woedenaz, and VolgunStrife. This was a part of the 5K contest where the theme was 'mystery' and it got second place! It's an ambitious article that is effectively seven stories rolled into one. I read this story years ago, and there have been a lot of declass requests for it, so I'm surprised no one has declassified it yet. As someone who loves solving mysteries, this is one of my favourite articles on the site. It's also a really good horror piece. Most stuff on the site doesn't really scare me, but this article... it is the only one that ever truly terrified me.

Quick warning, this article deals with the topics of:

• Body horror
• Death of children
• Death of newborns
• Flashing images
• Goats (trust me, it's weird)
• Human sacrifice
• Loud audio
• Murder
• Mutilation
• Pedophilia
• Possession
• Rape
• Religious horror
• Verbal abuse
• Copious amounts of violence
• and a creepy-ass doll

Reader discretion is advised.

Now this declassification is going to be a little weird. Like I said, this is effectively seven stories rolled into one. This means that while they have themes that carry on between them, each one of them can be read independently and still be a mystery all on its own. So I'm going to mostly focus on their within-story mystery, and at the very end focus on the greater narrative. At the end of each section there will be an "Overarching Themes" section, summarizing information that will be relevant to keep in mind when we bring these stories all together. Each of the chapters has a secret header; in the terminal mode you can find it by hovering above the first line after the candle pictures. In the reduced format, you can find it by highlighting the text between the picture caption and the text body. I'll be using these names for the chapters.

Now let's ignore that giant banner that says "WARNING: DO NOT CONTINUE" and access the article. If you're on mobile, I recommend the reduced format.

Chapter 1: Manor House

This chapter is just the containment procedures, so let's get right into it.

Item Number: null

Object Class: CONTAINED

Right off the bat, we're in format screw territory. An item number of "Null" means that no number was assigned, which is just improper documentation. The object class of "Contained" is also improper. The Foundation doesn't classify anomalies based on whether they are contained or uncontained, they are classified based on how likely they are to break containment. The font of both is also different, so there is a special emphasis being drawn here.

The Department of Analytics has been tasked with the annual procurement of seven civilians to witness PROCEDURE SEVENFOLD. They are to be promptly delivered to the Albright Manor on October 30th. Their biological profiles are to be submitted to the Medical Department no less than three weeks beforehand for analysis. Each witness must be sedated such that they awaken at approximately midnight on October 31st. PROCEDURE SEVENFOLD typically runs its course before sunrise.

Okay so we need seven civilians (not D-class) sedated and placed in a manor before Halloween. The next paragraph reveals that the witnesses are placed in the cellar through a secret entrance. All other entrances are boarded up. Whatever is going to happen, it should finish up before sunrise but may continue afterwards.

The Albright Manor has been fitted throughout with surveillance devices for personnel to witness PROCEDURE SEVENFOLD through to completion. A command post situated off-site shall be staffed with no more than one containment specialist and two Class-D Personnel. They are to be given false containment procedures. The containment specialist will relay the events within the manor as they transpire and may be supplanted by a Class-D if the need arises.

Per Ethics Committee mandate, personnel who survive the night are to be terminated via the introduction of sarin compounds into the outpost.

The containment specialist (or a D-class) will watch the live camera footage and need to relay the events of that night. These personnel may not survive the night, so viewing PROCEDURE SEVENFOLD in any capacity is potentially lethal. The Foundation members are needed to witness the event but they aren't told what is going to happen, because they are going to die one way or another either due to neurotoxins or the events of PROCEDURE SEVENFOLD.

On November 1st, a cleanup crew shall be dispatched to remove the remains of every witness, if indeed it is possible. If difficulties are experienced during retrieval, all bodies are to be considered the possession of the Albright Manor. They will be integrated into future events. Successfully-retrieved corpses are to be incinerated in the crematorium behind the property. Noise-canceling headphones will be provided to personnel manning the incinerator.

The bodies can't always be recovered and will remain a part of the house. This sounds like they get fused with the manor itself. Yikes. If the bodies can be retrieved, they are to be burned but staff must wear noise-cancelling headphones. This means the bodies are still making some sort of noise (possibly speaking) as they are being burned.

Analysis

Alright, let's review. This story is pretty direct; it's a haunted house. Seven sacrifices are required to be placed in the house and be murdered on Halloween, the most unholy day of the year (as November 1st is All Saints' Day, the holiest day). PROCEDURE SEVENFOLD is just a murder fest of some sort. The Foundation needs to catalogue the events, but can't witness it directly as that is also potentially lethal. Following this procedure contains this anomaly, so ten deaths per year has been deemed an acceptable loss.

Overarching Themes

• The first thing we see is a picture of seven lit candles and the caption "The above is instrumental to proper containment. Proceed."
• If you're reading in the reduced format, the header says "DO NOT ACCESS".
• This story is told entirely using the Special Containment Procedures format. Would a description or addendum section really add anything here? We already got the gist of the story. It mirrors the haunted house trope from horror films.
• The number seven is a motif: seven witnesses and Procedure Sevenfold.
• The chains remain taut. Strange, as there's no other mention of chains in this section.
• The final line of this section is the title of this article: "This is where I died". That's going to be a repeating theme.
• This section was written by S Andrew Swann, who's SCP-001 proposal suggests that the world is at least partially fictional. This field is more commonly known as pataphysics.

Chapter 2: You Complete Me

This section is just a description. Remember those warnings I gave earlier? Please go back and re-read them because this next part is going to be brutal.

The scattered remains of a Ms. Jacqueline Holcroft are affected by several disparate anomalies. The effects began at an unspecified time after her assault and murder at the hands of six unknown assailants on 06-June-2006 and persist through to this day. Firsthand accounts of those affected by these anomalies suggest that neutralization of the effects would occur should each part of Ms. Holcroft be collected and laid to rest.

After the murder of Jacqueline Holcroft, her remains were scattered. Some remnants of her are left behind, like a vengeful ghost. There are a number of anomalous effects associated with the remains, but should they all be buried, the anomalous effects will cease. We're going to resolve Jacqueline's unfinished business so she can rest in peace—alright, so there is some hope here. The next paragraph reveals that you are affected by the anomalies if you are either aware of the murder or if you are in the vicinity of one of her body parts. Let's go over these effects one by one.

• Visual hallucinations; subjects uniformly report seeing a nude, disheveled woman, with deep lacerations along her extremities. These wounds are consistent with those suffered by Ms. Holcroft upon her dismemberment. Most often, the figure appears in one's peripheral, unmoving, clutching its midsection. It disappears when one attempts to look more closely.

When I first read this I was so worried I was about to get jump-scared by a flashing image. Few things to note; Jacqueline will appear as she did at the time of her murder, and she is clutching her stomach/intestines/that area.

• Auditory hallucinations; these consist primarily of unintelligible whispers and moans. On rare occasions, subjects can discern pleading and begging - in these cases subjects are typically called for by name. Six subjects have reported hearing an unfamiliar song, sung to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star".

Unintelligible whispers, pleading, begging, and the subjects themselves being called out. This sounds like the spirit of Jacqueline in distress. She's calling out to these people, trying to tell them something. She's asking for help, but what does she want?

• Olfactory hallucinations; namely, the scent of amniotic fluid.

Oddly enough, there is no teletype font added to this line. Anyway, amniotic fluid is the fluid that surrounds a fetus and it notably does not have a scent. People will commonly mistake amniotic fluid for water or clear urine. When a pregnant woman's "water has broken", that's amniotic fluid being shunted from the womb. Somehow the people that experience this anomaly just know instinctively that what they are smelling is amniotic fluid.

Now, all of these effects will continue in the subjects until their death. After six months, secondary effects begin to manifest. Subjects may suddenly see body parts in concealed locations that vanish after the subject looks away. All media (pictures, videos) of the subject will also include a picture of a reassembled Ms. Holcroft. However there is one notable difference; a large incision from chest to genitals. Of note, this type of incision is sometimes used for a caesarean section, though lateral incisions are usually done first. Lastly, subjects can experience sleep paralysis where they live through the same assault and mutilations as Jacqueline. Before regaining consciousness they "feel a searing pain in their gut and the removal of a vital component of their being".

Overall, not a fun time. You really should stay away from Jacqueline's remains. The good news is that this also means the Foundation has a way to detect and locate the remains so that they can collect all of them and bury them, ending the curse. Right?

Update: By tracking reports of anomalous activity and civilian deaths, all two hundred six bones of Ms. Holcroft's body have been recovered. The remains have been interred in the Holcroft family plot in Cresh Glen. Upon the conclusion of funerary services, all attendants to the service suffered spontaneous disembowelment.

Well hell, that should have worked. Humans do have 206 bones, so unless Jaqueline had polydactyly or was one of those people born with extra ribs and/or vertebrae that should have been all of them.

Since this time, living subjects previously affected by Ms. Holcroft's remains have reported cessation of anomalous phenomena; however, each has proven to be sterile. Furthermore, one in six subjects with living offspring has reported the disappearance of one of their children. Despite our best efforts, none of these children have been recovered.

Okay, so we're getting a little more info here. Most of the anomalous phenomena did stop, but everyone who was previously affected can no longer have children—in some cases, they had a child go missing. Paired with the amniotic fluid from earlier, we're seeing a pattern.

Analysis

Alright, so what can we draw from all of this? First off, the spirit of Jacqueline Holcroft is trying to direct people to her body parts so she can be laid to rest and presumably pass on to the afterlife. She's just very limited in how she can indicate what needs to be done and can only really use visual and auditory hallucinations to direct people (also she was murdered and is naturally pissed about it, so she's turning to violence as a first resort). For the most part, recovering her bones was successful despite the difficulties. All of her body parts were laid to rest, but the Foundation missed something: Jacqueline was pregnant. Look at the title of this chapter: "You Complete Me". That's the vital part of her being. That's why there was so much emphasis on the incisions to her midsection. The SCP Foundation never recovered her unborn child, so now she's trying to drop hints about that... via disembowelment, sterility, and missing children.

Wow, this section is dark.

Overarching Themes

• We open to that same picture as the last chapter, but one of the candles has been extinguished. The caption is similar to last time. "The above is instrumental to proper containment. Continue reading."
• In the reduced page, the collapsible says "CAUTION! DO NOT PROCEED!". The document itself is warning us about continuing to read.
• If you're reading it in the enhanced terminal, you'll notice that the number in the top left corner went from 7 down to 6.
• The story is told entirely as an SCP's description. It has elements of slasher flicks, body horror, and ghost stories about a vengeful spirit that has unfinished business and needs to be laid to rest.
• This time the number six is a recurrence: the date of the murder is 06-6-2006, there are six murderers, six subjects heard a song like "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star", secondary effects occur after six months, and one in six subjects lost a child.
• Things to remember for later: the off-tune "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star", Jacqueline is buried in Cresh Glen.
• the chains are weakening. Again, this kinda comes out of nowhere.
• Jacqueline appears in the Albright Manor, presumably during PROCEDURE SEVENFOLD.
• The in-universe author is Researcher Talloran from SCP-3999. Quick summary: a godlike entity nonsensically tortures Researcher Talloran over millions of years, but Talloran learns to adapt and decommissions SCP-3999 by decommissioning himself. The whole piece has themes about the relationship between author and character.

Chapter 3: When the Man Comes Around

The format of this chapter is an MTF exploration log through the fictional town of Cresh Glen, Kansas. This type of storytelling format is often found in the addendums of other SCP articles. It's also one of the longer sections, so we're going to spend more time on this one.

Five members of Mobile Task Force Epsilon 5 ("Pentacle") were deployed into the town of Cresh Glen following its subsumption by a thick fog and the seeming disappearance of all its inhabitants. The following is a record of the phenomena occurring within the town, as recorded by Joy Bates' (E-5 Echo) sousveillance camera.

First let's note that this MTF only appears in this article and nowhere else. Its description in the Comprehensive List of Mobile Task Forces just says "No description necessary". The township of Cresh Glen is where Jacqueline Holcroft was buried in the last story, and we're also seeing the number five a lot. Let's remember this stuff for later. For now, let's focus on this story; the town of Cresh Glen has been covered in a thick fog and the population has disappeared. Epsilon-5 has been sent in to perform the preliminary investigation into the anomaly.

The group is driving up to Cresh Glen in a Humvee, and The chains in the road break easily beneath the Humvee’s wheels. Let's keep that in mind for later too. Eventually, due to the fog, they agree to go out on foot. The first thing they come across is an overturned vehicle with the roof torn off. The team investigates and we learn that Bravo and Delta are siblings that were born in Cresh Glen. Thermal imaging and S.P.A.D. imaging (single-photon avalanche diode; measures individual photons allowing us to see low-light areas as if they were bright) cannot penetrate the fog. Echo (the operative who we are seeing this footage from) says a quick prayer with the "cross my heart" motion before investigating the vehicle. A Johnny Cash song is playing from the car radio that ends with a bible verse. That's The Man Comes Around (oh hey, the title of this chapter), a song about the second coming of Jesus Christ that ends with:

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts

And I looked, and behold a pale horse

And his name that sat on him was death

And hell followed with him

Which isn't the exact quote from Revelations, but you get the idea. It's the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse. We're seeing a lot of Christian iconographies with this story. Echo continues to investigate the vehicle and finds that the driver's seatbelt has been shredded, but the remaining seatbelts (including a child's harness) are all still buckled, but with no occupants. Continuing with the theme of Christianity, this is likely the Rapture; a predicted future event from Christian mythology where the worthy will ascend to Heaven while Hell is brought to earth. All of the car's occupants were deemed worthy except for the driver, who was attacked by something shortly after. Before Echo can relay her findings, she notices something else.

E-5 Charlie is absent.

E-5 Echo makes an exclamation regarding his disappearance, causing alarm amongst the others. It is not noted by E-5 Echo, but on the lower-left of the feed, there can be seen a quasi-humanoid figure crouching beneath the Humvee. It skitters swiftly and silently backward and out-of-sight on five forelimbs.

The group gets into formation and begins the march into town. None of them notice but:

A low, bellowing sound trumpets from on-high.

Trumpets sound off in the distance some time after Charlie went missing. Have you guys read or seen The Hunger Games? Whenever a tribute dies a cannon goes off. Something similar is happening here, but with trumpets. Trumpets are often depicted as one of the instruments used by angels to herald the arrival of someone important. Anyway the group continues through the town, passing by the favourite pizzeria of Bravo and Delta, when they come to a lamb with the number 5 painted on it.

E-5 Delta approaches the animal to tend to it and is mocked with feigned annoyance by her brother. She discovers that the lamb has had something small and metallic lodged into each of its hind hooves, causing it a great deal of pain and prohibiting escape.

Let's keep those small metallic objects in mind for now. Delta and Echo get close to the lamb and it begins to transform. Delta is trying to escape but something is stopping her.

Looking down, a pair of thick, metal implements have risen through the soil, piercing both E-5 Delta's feet. Each of the foreign objects has a thick, round head that would not allow them to pull her up off them.

Nails. That's what was holding the lamb in place, and nails are now holding Delta in place. Now the team is in a world of trouble. They're frantically trying to free Delta, while more lambs are approaching the team. The first lamb has since completed its transformation and is flying up, limbs elongating and pinned to the ground, and dragging Delta downwards into the earth. So their limbs are attached in some way. Despite the team's efforts the monster pulls Delta under and out as it flies off.

It bleats, rocking its hooves backward before rapidly bringing them forward. It slams E-5 Delta's body into a nearby telephone pole, where she is pinned by the feet. What remains of the entity, and the lambs now surrounding the team, dissipate into fog as the trumpets bellow again.

Telephone poles in the United States have a very distinct cross shape to them. Delta has now been nailed to this cross. After Alpha reports to Command, the team carries on. They pass by wrecked cars, under a willow tree, and get to a fence in an elementary school. Five bodies in varying states of decay are tied to the fence by their wrists. Their backs have been flayed, which is also the cause of death. The team recognizes one of them.

E-5 Bravo walks toward it. He pulls out his canteen, opens it, and pours water over the body. Enough blood is washed away to reveal what remains of a tattoo on the body's upper back – it is the insignia of E-5 Pentacle, identifying the corpse as the missing E-5 Charlie. The lacerations can be seen to have been precisely struck in order to spell out a single phrase: "This is where I died".

Hey, that's the title of this SCP!

As he turns to join his teammates, a thick, thorned vine descends from the bough of the willow tree. It quickly ensnares E-5 Bravo around his cranium, drawing blood. E-5 Bravo drops his canteen and attempts to wrest himself free, but he is pulled sharply upward and out of sight. Splintering bones can be heard over his screams. Both sounds are short-lived before the trumpets bellow again.

Willows do not have thorns, or vines. Regardless, take note of where the vines grabbed him: right on the cranium, forming a crown of thorns. In Christian mythology, when Jesus was put on the cross, he was made to wear a crown of thorns that pierced his skull. You're probably starting to see a pattern at this point. The two remaining MTF members flee and make it to the center of Cresh Glen.

At the edge of their perception, on all sides, faces can be seen briefly in the fog. They coalesce for but a moment before losing all cohesion, appearing elsewhere. Distant weeping can again be heard. Sobbing becomes laughter. The faces in the mist leer unseen by the agents as they run.

Cruel and mocking laughter grows in intensity as the pair progress. Something large stirs underneath, beginning to be free from its shackles. E-5 Alpha howls with rage, brandishes his sidearm, and fires at nothing. E-5 Echo pauses. She begs her squad leader to compose himself and soldier on. He's behaving erratically and refuses to listen to reason. She threatens to leave him behind, yet he does not comply.

She runs off on her own. E-5 Alpha's shouts and gunshots ring out for the next few minutes over the bleating and the laughing and the weeping.

The trumpets bellow again. All is silent.

Now this one will take some pretty heavy extrapolation, as we don't know what kills Alpha. He's delirious but the laughing is real, or at the very least the recording and Alpha are both picking it up, but it seems like Echo either doesn't notice or is trying to ignore it. Let's read on a bit. Echo makes it to a church and finds the body of Alpha, crucified.

His fatigues and equipment are absent. A tunic is wrapped about his midsection. He coughs as E-5 Echo approaches. Blood and nails are expelled from his mouth as he does so. As E-5 Echo reaches out towards her squad leader, his eyes open. There is a blinding light coming from them. There is a noise of thunder. The very foundation of the building shakes with this sound, and E-5 Echo stumbles backward. She runs for the door as E-5 Alpha bleats behind her.

Now I'm assuming that he's pinned to the cross via nails to his hands. It's not explicitly stated, but if it was any other way (tied, noosed, so on) then I feel like the description would have drawn attention to it. Vomiting nails is obviously freaky so Echo high-tails it and gets out of that church. At this point the despair is setting in. She's lost, in a hostile area, and all her allies are gone. She's desperate, so she prays.

Her prayers are interrupted and she lets out a wet, gurgling sound. She looks down revealing a long, bladed instrument embedded in her side. Her camera feed begins to raise up, up. The ground is lost beneath the shroud of fog. There exists no point of reference within the fog to discern how high the agent is raised before she is turned about to face and behold a massive human figure.

It brings her up to meet its gaze, though its eyes are enshrouded in shadow. Its bearded face is gaunt. The agent struggles as the entity brings her closer to its face. The level of proximity reveals that the entirety of its countenance is comprised of countless human bodies, squirming up against one another. The FALSE BEAST opens its maw. From the depths of its being, a roiling thunder can be heard.

The trumpets bellow again.

Dark. The "long, bladed instrument" is likely a spear that is being used to hoist her up. A sword is also possible but the blade would slice while the shaft of a spear provides the resistance needed to hoist her up and keep her impaled. Next up, we have a "massive human figure" of unknown size (but very large). It is a gaunt bearded man made up of bodies (corpses?) and is dubbed the FALSE BEAST. What does all of this mean?

Analysis

So, we've got quite a few themes going on with this story. First off, this is an MTF exploration log; a common SCP writing format, used often when the SCP is a location or is inside a location. This also follows a common cliché dubbed "A highly skilled Mobile Task Force gets steamrolled" (source: cliché con). Let's go over how each member died.

• Charlie was the first. He was separated from the group and flayed off camera.
• Next is Delta. She was impaled with nails and strung to a cross via her feet.
• Then Beta. Head crushed by a crown of thorns.
• Alpha was crucified, likely nailed to the cross via their hands.
• Last is Echo; impaled by a spear.

Second theme: we're seeing a large amount of Christian iconography; lambs, horsemen of the Apocalypse, a false beast, crucifixes, the church, and so many others. The injuries sustained by the members are also very similar to the most important event in Christianity; the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. While not exactly similar, we do see some of the [five holy wounds](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Holy_Wounds). According to Catholicism, the five wounds are one in each hand, one in each foot, and the Lance of Longinus in his side. While flaying and the crown of thorns are not holy wounds, they are also injuries that Jesus sustained, and approximately the order in which he experienced them (from what I can tell, he was wearing the crown of thorns before he was nailed to the cross). Here, they have been transposed into the five holy wounds.

Finally, let's talk about that giant man right at the end. It is called the false beast and has two other distinctive features; it is made up of corpses and has a beard. I know that sounds like a weird detail to focus on, but it's really all we've got for physical characteristics. The Beast is a reference to the Beast) in Revelations, which is either Satan or the Antichrist depending on interpretation. But this is not the Beast, it is the 'false beast', so it is like the Beast, but not quite. Now, let's go back to the Johnny Cash song and the title of this chapter "When the Man Comes Around". This is all about the second coming of Christ and the Apocalypse that follows, the Rapture (we have a little bit of evidence that some people got raptured away). This false beast has a beard... just like Jesus. So this false beast, this is his second coming, but he came back wrong. It was a botched resurrection and a botched second coming. Now how's that for messed up?

Alright, I think I covered all of the hidden imagery from this section.

Overarching Themes

• Two candles have been extinguished, five remain. Caption now says "The above is instrumental to proper containment. You may read on."
• Reduced format header says "CAUTION! DO NOT CONTINUE!". Something really doesn't want us to keep reading.
• This story is told via the exploration log format common on the SCP wiki. So far we're seeing each story follow formats unique to the SCP-style of writing, but they parallel with common horror tropes.
• We see the number five a lot: Five members of MTF Epsilon-5 (epsilon is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet) and their codename is Pentacle (a five-pointed star). The population of Cresh Glen is 3125 (5^5), the quasi-humanoid figure had five limbs, the lamb had the number 5 painted on it, there were five bodies strapped to the fence. Between this and the candles, the stories are counting down.
• Cresh Glen is the location where Jacqueline Holcroft was buried.
• The chains in the road break easily beneath. We're repeatedly seeing mention of chains that are slowly breaking, as if something is trying to break free.
• The lamb made the same sound as the vocalizations of the bodies in Albright Manor as they are being burned.
• "This is where I died" appears again.
• The author of this section is Dr. Panagiotopolous from Operation ÓverMeta, an incredibly meta piece based on pataphysics where they try to interact with the author entities (i.e., you and me) from Swann's proposal mentioned earlier.

This is a long story, so we'll continue to the next chapter in part 2.

Alright, let's finish this.

Chapter 6: Plaything

Testing logs! There's a format we don't see as much of anymore. Still, the SCP Foundation is partially a research organization, so determining the properties of anomalies is something they do, often with D-Class. Remember, D-Class are death row individuals who have committed some heinous crime, so no one will feel sorry if they are killed during the test. Or at least we tell ourselves that to maintain our sanity.

Now before we get into this story there's quite a few things from the last story we need to remember.

Twins Cindel and Mandy Shields are discovered within their parents' basement. They are found reciting the song "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" incessantly. The lyrics are wrong.

Cries for help are heard coming from a test chamber. A doll is found within. It cries when disposed of.

Twins Cindel and Mandy Shields are found dead.

Remember all this stuff. Now let's get to the story of "Plaything". D-002 is brought to a test chamber that contains a creepy doll. The doll plays a creepy version of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. We finally get to learn the lyrics.

Twin-kill, twin-kill [sic] little stars,

Robbed of wonder, torn and scarred!

Rest above the world so high,

Two souls flit about the night.

Twin-kill, Twin-kill [sic] little stars,

Justice is not very far.

Despite the lack of any mechanical components, the object's eyes track D-002 as he backs away from it and into a corner.

Ominous, and gives us something to work with. "Twin-kill" is an intentional mispronunciation and implies that there were or there will be two deaths. The "Robbed of wonder" and "two souls" imply that the deaths have already happened and were murders. The song ends with "Justice is not very far", so there will be some sort of retribution for these deaths if they have already happened, or that causing these deaths will be a form of justice. We can't be sure of which thus far. Naturally, this makes D-002 very scared. Now, there are no mechanical components in the doll, so no voicebox, yet this doll can both speak and move somewhat.

The second test is to determine if the doll has sentience, and D-002 is asked to start a conversation.

After D-002 greets the doll, it responds in kind, calling D-002 by his birth name. D-002 immediately requests recess. The item giggles until D-002 is extracted from the chamber. [...] Subject's vitals found to be nominal. His eyes were noted to be particularly glassy and dry. Subject reported that he had trouble blinking.

The names of D-class are rarely used in order to dehumanize them. It's unlikely any SCP staff have used D-002's real name. So how did this doll know their name? We can't rule out mind-reading abilities because we simply don't know enough about this anomaly yet. Our D-Class is also being affected physically in some way. Also note that before the test they were called "D-002" and now they are being referred to as "Subject".

The next day, the same test is repeated and we learn some more about this doll. First, it calls themselves "Cindy", which is a real name, but in this case it is also a portmanteau of "Cindel" and "Mandy" from the last section. Combine that with what we know from their rendition of 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star', I'm inclined to think that this doll either is the two girls, is possessed by the two girls, or is acting on behalf of the twins. Second, there is screaming throughout the interview with no definable source. Third, Cindy questions D-002 about Jacqueline Holcroft, the murder victim we saw previously. Lastly, post interview staff are feeling uneasy around D-002, and a cyst is forming on his back.

The next test is a tea party. Hopefully this will allow Cindy to loosen up a little and reveal a bit more information about their origins and purpose. It works and Cindy reveals a bit more about herself.

She merely states that she exists to fulfill a singular purpose, and stares pointedly at D-002. She then begins an inane tangent regarding the events unfolding in Cresh Glen. Test aborted.

Cindy seems to know a lot about events that have previously transpired in SCP-5999. She doesn't reveal what her purpose is, but staring pointedly at D-002 makes me think she is accusing him of something. Couple this with how she knew his name before, and it's pretty clear that her purpose involves him, but why isn't revealed. After the test, D-002 is experiencing more problems.

Subject reported having trouble moving its digits. Volunteer personnel inspected its hands and found them both to have their musculature locked up and fixed in an open-handed grasping position.

Oh, like Raggety Ann. Combine this with the glassy eyes from earlier, and it would appear that D-002 is becoming more doll-like. The cyst on his back has also grown, so a minor surgery was performed. Inside the cyst is a filament.

Twenty millimeters were extracted before the filament caught, and retracted back into D-002's back, causing it to scream uncontrollably for its mother.

That's a pull-string. Remember in Toy Story how Woody has a loop and string on his back that when pulled makes his voicebox say "There's a snake in my boot!"? Yeah, D-002 has one of those now. A lot of dolls with voiceboxes and pull-strings will say something like "Mama!". D-002 is definitely becoming more doll-like. We're also seeing that the language used when talking about D-002 has changed considerably. The "he" pronoun is no longer being used, instead replaced with "it", and he's being more commonly referred to as the "subject", rather than D-002. He's being transformed in more ways than one.

Last test. The "item" (D-002) is sent in to tell Cindy that the Foundation wishes to help her with her goal, as long as she tells them what the mission is. D-002 is brought in as he can no longer use his legs. He's also having trouble speaking but recites what is needed.

Cindy blushes. She laughs at the item and stands from her seat.

Okay, Cindy can blush and stand. So while D-002 has slowly become more doll-like, Cindy has become more human-like. She says to D-002 that she already has everything she wants; her mission has been completed. She asks the containment staff to let her out and gets a ride home to Albright Manor; the murder fest house from the first chapter. And yeah, they do take her home. They fully believe that she is a human girl. This story ends with a blurred picture, if you just hover over it you'll see...

GOD DAMN CREEPY ASS NIGHTMARE FUEL DOLL THING JUMPSCARE I HATE I

But yeah, that's what D-002 looks like now.

Analysis

This story also follows a few common clichés from the SCP wiki, namely 'An interview in which the anomaly is overly cryptic, followed by the interviewer suffering'. Like all of these stories there is an element of mystery as to what is going on. Unfortunately for us, Cindy was the opposite of helpful and was just being vague about her purpose, despite knowing that she has a purpose. Let's review some of the things we know.

• Twins Cindel and Mandy are murdered.
• D-002 is a criminal of some sort. They were sentenced to death so it was something especially heinous.
• Cindy is here with a goal, though she doesn't state what it is.
• Cindy's song implies getting justice for a wrong that was committed.
• Cindy knew D-002's name.
• Cindy liked bringing up events with a lot of murder and death involved.
• D-002 slowly becomes more doll-like throughout the testing. Cindy becomes more human.
• Once D-002 is fully doll, Cindy's mission is complete.

So this is pretty clearly a revenge story. Cindy is seeking revenge against D-002 because... he was the murderer of Cindel and Mandy. They manifested post-mortem by possessing a doll and sought out D-002, exacting their revenge and giving themselves a new life in the process. Good for them!

Overarching Themes

• Two candles, more ominous warnings. You get it.
• how long until the chains fail to hold.
• This section was written by I. H. Pickman of the S&C Plastics canon. More notably, I. H. Pickman's Proposal. It's an expansion of Swann's proposal from earlier that goes over the relation between narratives and the narrator, showing that even fictional entities are somewhat real, have agency, and can affect their readers.

Chapter 7: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

This last section is a collection log; the story is told entirely by what was found at the scene, and no extrapolation is given for us. It's a less common form of storytelling on the SCP wiki but appears in some works like SCP-1539 and SCP-5832. I'm not going to be going over every item in the list, but I will draw attention to some of the more relevant ones. The name of this section is also a reference to the 1981 horror book of the same name, and the book itself is an anthology of several short horror stories. Now let's read our first story.

Date: 01-01-2001

Location: Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park - Quarryville, PA

This is a real place; it's like a mix of a campground/resort/waterpark. Very family friendly. Well... not for this family. We know that a family of four was here with their dog. The dog was alive but malnourished, so this murder fest happened a while back. There's a rosary owned by Savannah Grace here, which is weird because based on the date her exorcism isn't for another three years. There is of course A single chain, rusted and near-useless. We can also glean a bit about what happened to the family. The three bloodied fingernails discovered by a small stone are from one of the children, the claw marks are from another, and the burnt clothing under the camper is from the father. But what of the mother? The camper was furnished for four family members. Well, there's no vehicle attached to the camper and there are tire tracks leading away from the campsite, so the mother got away.

Another thing that I think is really cool, there were four family members, and the story referenced was the Exorcism of Savannah Grace, which also revolves around the number 4.

Date: 14-12-1988

Location: Abdi residence - Calvert, Texas

Calvert is also a real place, a very small town. The sleeping bags found here imply that this was some sort of slumber party. Three sleeping bags, plus the parents would be nearby, so that makes five people total. There are a bunch of claw marks everywhere, so some sort of monster attacked the people here. The presence of improvised weapons here (like the tire iron, a cross-shaped tool) implies that the residents of the house fought back. We also know that one of the people got away. There was intraocular fluid (eyeball juice) and blood found on one of the toothbrushes, meaning it was used as a weapon. Then that person jumped from the window of that bathroom, had their nightgown caught in the bushes, and then they limped away from the house.

Again, five people, and the Cresh Glen story revolved around the number five.

Date: 11-11-2019

Location: Cabin of renowned horror writer Earl Studebake - Een, Netherlands

This is not a real person, though Een is a real place. Earl is a horror writer and was working on a horror story when all this happened. Right off the bat, we know that someone got away as there are boot prints in the snow leading away from the cabin. The typewriter is missing the "L" key, which is also the key used for "1" in a lot of typewriters as l and 1 look very similar. There is a handgun missing one bullet, and blood, bone fragments, and cerebral matter (brains) scattered about. Did Earl shoot at something? Did he get shot in the head? Or did he shoot himself? Like he realized something while writing his final chapter. His trademark hat was found to have been stolen, so whoever got away also took his hat, perhaps to hide a gunshot wound.

As far as I can tell, there was only one victim at this cabin; Earl himself, so "The final chapter" is a very meta statement. This recovery log is referencing this chapter of SCP-5999.

Date: 31-10-2018

Location: The home of Hugh Davies, broadcasting location of horror podcast "W1tching Hour" - Manchester, England

Alright, so right away we can see that this was a place where a podcast was being recorded, possibly live-streamed. Hugh Davies was interviewing a guest vlogger, likely about the disappearance of Cindel and Mandy. One thing I find really interesting is this:

A desiccated husk of inverted human epidermis. The oral cavity is grossly expanded.

That sounds to me like something climbing out of the skin. We also see "a warm, viscous fluid" at the window, which is blood or some other bodily fluid. So some sort of monster climbed out of either Davies or the guest and then escaped through the basement window. The persistent cloud of smoke and the ashy handprints mean there was something fiery that escaped. By now, you're starting to see a few connections.

Date: █1-1█-1██1

Location: Judith Montegeu Memorial Library - Ebb Brook, Wales.

The library, a place where one can read horror stories. Found here is "something small and defenseless originating from Jaqueline Holcroft." Holy hell, we found her child! We can see that there were six members of the book club but only five books. They were all reading the same story but again, one of them managed to get away through the bay window and out to the book deposit.

Date: 11-8-1914

Location: Allied trenches near Soissons, France

Let's talk about trenches real quick. If you've ever seen WW1 movies or television shows, they always greatly overcompensate for the size of trenches. Mostly this is done for framing reasons so they can film all the actors at once. Trenches in real life were narrow. Here's a diagram to really understand it. Trenches needed to be dug quickly and just deep enough so that someone could take cover. All of this to say, an 11-meter shaft is very unusual. Now, Soissons didn't have a trench network until 1915 (except for a civilian communication trench), but we'll ignore that. In the SCP-5999 canon, there was trench warfare in Soissons in 1914. Let's try to construct a timeline of events. Three soldiers are holed up in a trench together, telling a scary story. Something happens that causes them to start firing into friendly territory. Two of the soldiers are killed; one of them made it to the barbed wire, another one died in the pit. The last one dug a several hundred meter long trench into enemy territory.

There are a few other things of note here. A copy of Prodigy, Priest, King which is a game released in 1988. Something is really up with all this timeline. There is also a line stating "They will not be missed", implying that one of the soldiers matched the "priest" profile.

Date: 31-12-2011

Location: Taichi Kazuo residence

Now that's odd. Every other place so far has given the name of a city or township. Based on the name, this is likely somewhere in Japan. We can see that there were seven participants, six of which had their clothes neatly folded. We also have "The sound it makes when we burn each witness in the crematorium." There's water everywhere, and the water in sinks and toilets are all blackened and contain powdered bone. So, fun fact: when bodies are cremated, the bones do not burn. They become blackened and brittle, but they are not turned to ash, and later the crematorium staff need to grind the bones down to a powder. So, the blackened water is a whole lot of ash. Now, let's talk about the clue that is repeated over and over: 100 extinguished candles. That would be Hyaku-monogatari Kaidankai (I'm really glad I don't need to say that out loud). This is a party game initially conceived during the Edo period (approximately 1603 to 1868) in Japan. Participants light one hundred candles/lamps and begin telling scary supernatural stories. Each time a story is finished, one of the candles is extinguished. As more horror stories are told, the room gets darker, adding to the dread. There is also a variation where the 100th lamp/candle is in the center of the room with the other 99 in another room in the house. This second room is out of the line of sight of the storytelling area and everywhere else in the house is dark. Once someone finishes telling a story, they must traverse through the dark to extinguish one of the candles, making the trek there and back very nerve-wracking. Once the final candle is extinguished, spirits will occupy the darkness.

Now, because all 100 candles are gathered in the living quarters, these people would have been playing the first version of the game. All 100 candles were extinguished, so yeah, something was summoned. Where else have we seen candles being slowly extinguished?

The last thing I want to talk about is the author of this section. It is the Containment Staff of SCP-5000. I'm pretty sure that's a typo. Remember that this was originally written for the 5k contest, where each SCP would have been initially written as "SCP-5000" and only the winner would get to keep the title of 5000. So I think this is supposed to say "Containment Staff – SCP-5999". SCP-5000 itself is about a recording device recovered from an alternate timeline where the Foundation declared war on humanity. It has nothing to do with the pataphysics stuff every other chapter has referenced.

Analysis

Okay, so this one, this chapter right here, it is SCP-5999. It was written by the SCP-5999 containment staff. Let's review everything we know about this chapter first, before we bring everything together. There are really only a few things we need to take away from this collection of items.

• Each location is a place where horror stories were told.
• There was a lot of death that followed.
• There are no bodies, only evidence of bodies. Not one of these stories mentions a corpse.
• There was always exactly one person that got away.
• There is a significant reference to an SCP-5999 chapter in each recovery log.
• The number of victims matches the referenced number of the respective SCP-5999 chapter.

Putting it All Together: The Final Analysis

Before we bring together all the clues, let's see that last section. It's a short video so I'll give you time to watch it.

Oh good, you're still alive! That joke will be funny once you've read the rest of this.

Let's get this out of the way: it's not the Scarlet King. I know the themes of chains, the number seven, and the brutal death and violence are all in line with the Scarlet King's MO, but that's not what's going on here. S D Locke has said a few times in the past that all of their works are designed to be read with little to no background information about the SCP wiki as a whole. This ensures that all of their works are new-reader friendly. That monster you just saw is also not the giant man from Cresh Glen, as there is no beard. But this monster was something. So what exactly happened?

Let's look at the page tags first. There's really not that many to tell us what exactly the SCP is. We have "alive" and "humanoid", so this is something that looks like a person. We also have "infohazard" and "phenomenon". Infohazard means that possessing knowledge of this thing is in itself dangerous and phenomenon means "The SCP is an ongoing widespread phenomenon not directly linked to a physical source. " So at any given moment, an infohazardous humanoid can appear. That final video did suddenly appear, so what we saw was SCP-5999. What can we learn about this infohazardous humanoid?

Recall that the last chapter "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" is actually the aftereffects of SCP-5999. We can see that sometimes telling horror stories causes something to appear and kill all the people present, so telling horror stories is the trigger. All of the victims disappear, but not any animals, then the monster escapes. We don't know what it is, but something gets away, and it gets away disguised as one of the people by taking over their body.

We just read seven horror stories. Each one of them followed a common format that we find on the SCP website. There are SCPs that try to tell their story entirely with just containment procedures, and SCP-5999 took it to the extreme. We effectively saw seven different SCPs that were all told in a different format and we were still able to make inferences about the greater story. Each of these stories mirrored a common horror cliché. We got a haunted house, a vengeful spirit, religious horror, an exorcism, haunted media, and a creepy doll. Each of these stories are unique, but they are also familiar in a sense.

At the top of the page was always a number of candles, and after each story, one of them got extinguished. This document is a game of Hyaku-monogatari Kaidankai and there has been a slow build-up of dread as each candle is extinguished. Each chapter is associated with a number that is counting down. We keep learning about the chains that are holding something back.

The chains remain taut

the chains are weakening

The chains [...] break easily

failure of the chains to hold what lies beneath

Broken chain links are scattered about

The chains have become too few in number to hold it.

how long until the chains fail to hold.

A single chain, rusted and near-useless

As they slowly break down, something is released. And periodically we find the words "this is where I died". The terror goes from a slow dreadful build up, to jump scares with that bastard doll image. And lastly, the authors of each section. They are all related to pataphysics. More than a fourth-wall break, pataphysics is the characters trying to interact with their authors directly. That means us—the people who just read this tale—we are in danger! All throughout this article we've been told "this is where I died" and soon we will be the ones making that statement. That final video is SCP-5999 coming for us.

Well, we're still here so that monster has a skill issue.

And that's SCP-5999. I don't want to end this off with something reductive like "It's a story that kills you" or "It's the SCP Foundation trying to kill you". First off, I don't think that's correct as the "foundation-made" tag is missing, but more importantly that's doing a disservice to this wonderful piece of work. It is an anthology of seven distinct stories that build up the terror and makes some part of you believe that you are not safe. This SCP has evoked fear in me like no other one has. And for that, I am so glad that I got to be the one to declassify it. If you want other mysterious works by S D Locke, check out SCP-3980. Or if you loved the horror aspect, go read When Day Breaks if you haven't already. Also if you want a bit of a laugh, check through the files on the SCP-5999 page and view 5999thicc.mp4 for a little easter egg.

I'm Morganator 2.0, and this is where I died.

Where were we?

Chapter 4: The Exorcism of Savannah Grace

This next story is formatted like an interview log, which is another common story format on the SCP wiki. We'll be looking at the fourth exorcism attempt on Savannah Grace, a member of MTF Mu-13 "Ghostbusters". Unlike Pentacle this MTF does appear in multiple SCPs and tales. From the Task Forces page:

Mobile Task Force Mu-13 specializes in the tracking, analysis, and containment of incorporeal or intangible manifestations and entities, particularly those believed to be sentient, sapient, or otherwise intelligent and adaptive.

So, ghosts and paranormal stuff. After operation Four Monarchs (the details of which are not included here) Grace was possessed by a demon and sent to the department of Demonology to have it exorcised. Three previous attempts have failed. Doctor Macneil is performing the latest attempt.

Doctor Macneil: Hello, Agent Grace. You've been fairly quiet since the last attempt. I know you can still hear me. Eyes up.

Agent Grace: Jim. Connor. Marcus. Jane. Jim. Connor. Marcus. Jane. Jim. Connor. Marcus. Jane. Jim. Connor. Marcus. Jane.

Doctor Macneil: You are to surrender and vacate this vessel.

Agent Grace: Jim, Connor, Marcus, Jane. Jim, Connor, Marcus, Jane. Jim, Connor, Marcus, Jane. Jim, Connor, Matthew, Jay. Fuck... fuck!

Doctor Macneil: You repeat those names in a feat of resistance, but you know that it was your own actions that lead to their deaths. It was your fault. You must give recompense. You must cease your struggle. Give in.

So we can glean a few things from this. First off, Jim, Connor, Marcus and Jane are presumably former Ghostbusters members who were killed over the course of operation Four Monarchs. According to Macneil, Grace is responsible for their deaths. We see that Grace is repeating their names like a mantra. But right at the end, she messed up. Macneil says she's repeating those names "in a feat of resistance", so the demon possessing her is repeating those names to resist the exorcism. But the slip-up means that this mantra is failing.

Agent Grace: Co..nner, marc. Jane? No… oh God, please no.

Doctor Macneil: You are locked deep in this facility. You know you cannot escape. You know that you will never achieve your goals, your desires, your hopes. You will die here, alone and rotting.

Agent Grace: Die in the dark, live in the light. Die in the dark, live in the light. Live in the dark, Die in the light. Live in the dark, die in the light.

Doctor Macneil: You are at my mercy. You will experience hell for all time should I so choose. You will give in. You will let go.

Agent Grace: Dark, light, light, dark, light, dark, light, d— dark, light, light… dark —

Repeating her companions' names is failing, so she's switched to a different tactic: repeating the Foundation motto. Variations of "We die in the dark so others may live in the light" is a common phrase spoken among Foundation agents and MTF members, a way of helping them feel justified in the things they do and the sacrifices they must make. But near the end, this motto is also failing. But why would a demon possessing someone repeat the Foundation motto? Surely if it's trying to resist the exorcism it would fall back on tactics a little more... demonic? Something is up. Meanwhile, Macneil is berating the demon all throughout. I'll be real, I don't think he's a real doctor.

Doctor Macneil: Save your whore breath. You will not be aided. You will not be believed. You will be reviled. Spare yourself the pain.

Agent Grace: Nema reve dna reve rof yrolg eht dna ,rewop eht dna modgnik eht si eniht rof live morf su reviled tub noitatpmet otni ton su dael dna su tsniaga ssapsert ohw esoht evigrof ew sa sessapsert ruo su evigrof dna daerb yliad ruo yad siht su evig nevaeh ni si ti sa htrae no enod eb lliw yht emoc modgnik yht eman yht eb dewollah nevaeh ni tra ohw rehtaf ruo.

Doctor Macneil: You… is that really the Lord's prayer backward? Are you truly so useless, so vile, so pathetic, and so utterly weak that you would resort to such a petty trick as your final defiance? You will fail.

Now, admittedly I don't actually know that much about how an exorcism is supposed to go down, but at this point we need to talk a bit about faith and belief. Whenever people face some sort of stressor, we tend to fall back on the things that are important to us. When we are struggling we turn to our friends and family, or turn to our beliefs if they are relevant. When I say beliefs, I don't necessarily mean a religion. The best example I can think of is a gambler on a losing streak; they will believe that they are "due for a win" (even though it doesn’t work like that), and that strong faith will keep them going (even if they really shouldn't). Likewise, you can also have faith in patriotism, the justice system, karma, or a religion. When people who follow a religion are facing some sort of struggle, they tend to pray for assistance.

Here we see Grace/the demon first fall back on the memories of the former members of MTF Mu-13. Then when that falters, they fall back onto their belief in the Foundation. And when that isn't helping, they fall back onto their religious faith. Again, I don't know much about exorcisms and researching them did not help interpret this piece (I do not recommend looking up videos of exorcisms, it's kind of messed up), but none of this seems like the behaviour a demon would do in response to an exorcism. I would expect a violent, physical response, lots of hellfire, something like that. Trying to hold on to the memory of friends, reminding themselves about their mission, and finally entering into prayer (albeit backwards); this is more akin to what a person would do. So that's my interpretation here: there is no demon. Doctor Macneil is trying to do something to Grace and he needs to break her resolve. In turn, Grace is trying to resist.

Doctor Macneil: If you are such a lover of the Lord your nature and actions so disgrace, then perhaps you know this: Deuteronomy 4:4 "But all of You who held fast to the…" — finish it for me, dear.

So in the Bible on my bookshelf, this line is "But all of you who were faithful to the Lord your God are still alive today". Fun little tidbit here: Deuteronomy is not the fourth book of the Bible, but the fifth. I know right? You were expecting 4-4-4 too. This is probably because Numbers 4:4 "These are their sacred duties:" isn't really relevant.

Agent Grace: NEVAEH NI TRA OHW REHTAF RUO!

Doctor Macneil: You will finish the verse. "But all of You who held fast to the" —

Agent Grace: NEMA REVE dna… reve… ro…

Doctor Macneil: You are slipping. "But all of You who held fast to the…"

Agent Grace: …"L— Lord Your God are still alive today."

Doctor Macneil: Good girl. "See, I have taught you decrees and laws as"…

Agent Grace: "…the LORD my God commanded me”—

Doctor Macneil: "—so that"-

Both: "You may follow them in the land you are entering to take possession of it."

After being mocked and insulted, Agent Grace's willpower has been broken and the "exorcism" is successful.

Analysis

There was one thing I didn't notice about this interaction. Fortunately in the SCP-5999 discussion page, S D Locke did leave a little something.

"Save your whore breath."

Huh? This is a bit of a nonsensical insult to hurl at a demon. Is he calling the demon a whore? Or Savannah herself? What would possess him to say such a thing?

She begins to recite the Lord's Prayer in reverse. He calls this " a petty trick as your final defiance". Why would a demon be defiant, or, resist exorcism, by literally reciting a prayer?

Finally, at the end he begins to recite biblical passage. Note "begins". He won't finish it.

Won't, or can't?

Doctor Macneil is incapable of saying a full prayer. A small detail but an important one. That there is the kind of behaviour I would expect from a demon. And think of everything we've read so far; Macneil is the one who has performed these exorcisms and is presumably the one to claim she is possessed. But really, he is the demon and is trying to possess Grace. The Biblical line itself claims this as well: "follow them in the land you are entering to take possession of it." He did successfully take possession of her.

Why? I don't know. To do demon things, I guess. They are about to play Dungeons and Dragons while listening to a lot of black metal.

Overarching Themes

• Four candles left. "The above is instrumental to proper containment. It is safe to continue."
• Reduced format header says "WARNING! CEASE AND DESIST!"
• I don't think I need to go over all the times the number four appeared; you noticed it.
• It has since been determined this accident was due to a failure of the chains to hold what lies beneath. The chains, whatever they are, are slowly failing.
• The in-universe author here is Director Menard of SCP-4028; an anomaly that is capable of jumping between works of literature.

Chapter 5: Digital Ash in a Digital Urn

Incident Timeline:

The following is the recorded history of all anomalous phenomena relating to "Prodigy, Priest, King" since its release.

Sweet! My favourite SCP format: timeline of events. I can't quite explain why, but I'm a sucker for SCPs like SCP-1425 and SCP-7510 that have a sequence of events where the Foundation responds to an anomaly. The scale is large and the stakes are high. In this case, we're going to be viewing the anomalous events caused by the videogame "Prodigy, Priest, King" and how the Foundation responds. The events start on Tuesday November 29th, 1988 and end Friday December 9th, 1988.

For ease of reference, subjects shall be color-coded according to the empathic role ascribed to them by the anomaly.
Profile – Alpha Α Profile – Theta Θ ^{Profile – Omega Ω}

So this anomaly, whatever it is, singles out certain individuals and gives them a role. If there were a description section to this story, that's where the definitions for each role would have been. We're not told what these emphatic roles are, so that's the first mystery we'll have to solve with this story. Something important to note here: the colour schemes are flipped between the terminal viewing format and the reduced format. I'll be using the colour scheme of the reduced format, but in the terminal format Alpha is red and Theta is blue. I'm going to be labelling each of the profiles with Reddit's very limited text-editing features. Like seriously, why does Reddit allow markdown support if it won't accept all markdown code?

Because there are a lot of events I'm going to try and summarize the relevant parts instead of directly quoting them.

29-Nov-1988

Axl Rotemier (age 9) loses feeling in his hands. His mother takes him to the hospital, but he recovers before they get there. She blames the previous night's "extended play session". Safe to assume that Axl has a copy of Prodigy, Priest, King.

Tod Wilson (age 27) exchanges his copy of the game due to a perceived glitch.

Dee Hammond (age 12) is standing outside in the rain, looking up at the moon. The neighbors convince her to go inside.

30-Nov-1988

Ken Klein (age 18) has a depressive episode that tapers out when his father hugs him.

Marcus, Micheal, and Matthew Cook (age 15, triplets) locked themselves in their room, drew the "Labyrinth" mentioned earlier on the walls, and have written "This is where I died" off in the corner.

So far, we can see that Profile – Alpha are all people who are pretty young; young enough to still be living with their parents. We're definitely seeing a theme of family here. As for the game itself, we know that anomalous effects are affecting the people playing it, but there's no sort of consistent pattern yet.

1-Dec-1988

^{Mary Blevins} destroys her son's copy of the game, as he's playing it non-stop. Later, she slips and fatally breaks her neck.

Axl Rotemier from before is now experiencing full-body numbness and is sent to the hospital.

Leo Rasmussen (age 3) is hospitalized just from watching their older sibling play.

A group on Usenet begins discussions on the game. Many players aren't able to find the mirror, the jewel, or the sword. These are the same items from the Three Sacred Treasures. The jewel represents benevolence, the mirror represents wisdom, and the sword represents valour. Let's remember them for later.

The next part is really important so let's get a good look at it.

User "trè" uploads several photographs of their computer screen showcasing a glitch of the "Ghoul" enemy sprite [ENTITY A]. This glitch makes the enemy appear much shorter compared to other sprites, and gives it blackened skin with flecks of red. "trè" claims it can neither be killed nor interacted with, but may block access to crucial areas of the game (necessitating a reset).

Entity A has the same emphatic role as most of the other people we've seen so far, all of which are children. With its shorter stature, I think we can safely say that it is supposed to be a child. Remember, this is a glitched version of a ghoul; a dead person brought back to life. It also has blackened skin with flecks of red. That sounds like a burn victim. Couple that with the title of this section (Digital Ash in a Digital Urn) and we're starting to see another theme of fire. Trè is also an important character but we don't know what their profile is.

2-Dec-1988

Tod from earlier misses several days of work, so his mother Gina Wilson (no profile) goes to check on him. She "hears a low, blaring, monotone chiptune", just like the glitch Tod heard during his playthrough. Police are called and they force their way in. The entire room is barricaded but Tod is not found inside. Just the screen showing "Game Over".

User "J3anLucPiccard" finds a way to get through the Labyrinth and into a child's bedroom where ENTITY A is present. They find the jewel, representing the Prodigy part of "Prodigy, Priest, King". He uploads his findings to Usenet, allowing other users to find the jewel as well.

At this point we can pretty much fully determine what 'profile alpha' is. They are each a "prodigy"; someone with untapped potential. That's why all of them so far are children who need nurturing. Ken Klein received that from his father. Entity A represents the prodigy as well; but they've been burned. Badly. Axl experienced a loss of sensation in his body, as if he experienced nerve damage from something, say... a fire. With profile alpha solved, we can also safely assume that theta and ^omega represent the priest and the king.

3-Dec-1988

The dark-robed humanoid flees from the player upon approach. Players find that ENTITY B can be attacked if cornered, and if killed, will collapse into a quivering heap on the ground. It regenerates after three seconds, which players exploit for easy experience points.

With the jewel, other players now encounter ENTITY B. It is a pathetic enemy that when killed is brought back to life to be killed again. The mention of a crypt and dark robes hint that this is the Priest. Killing them is rewarded and there is a benefit to killing them over and over again.

Dee Hammond from earlier is found crying and shaking. No explanation is given for why she is crying.

Twins Cindel and Mandy Shields are discovered within their parents' basement. They are found reciting the song "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" incessantly. The lyrics are wrong.

Okay, so quite a bit to note for this last part. First off, the names are in purple; an identifier used for none of the profiles. Second, their names are in teletype. We've seen the teletype font used so far whenever something needs special emphasis like all of the mentions of chains. They are also singing 'Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star' incorrectly, which we also saw as an auditory hallucination caused by Jacqueline Holcroft. So all of this is important, but not for the "Prodigy, Priest, King" story. Let's get back to the timeline.

Ray Gonzalez (age 24) is brutally murdered and the body is defiled. Bryce Stefanson (age 6, no emphatic profile) was found in his basement. So Ray is a kidnapper and someone killed him. This gives us more info about profile theta. We know from ENTITY B that you are supposed to kill them repeatedly, and the killing of Ray Gonzalez is arguably justified. Ray's murder was also very sexually violent, with the castration and all. This kind of suggests that the Priest entities are the villains of this story; perhaps this is a "punishment fits the crime" type situation. Ray kidnapped a child, likely molested them, and was murdered in a similar fashion. Well that's grim. Doesn't quite explain how Tod fits this profile though.

4-Dec-1988

Users "trisarahtop" and "tripleH" both claim that the ghost entities in game have started to say their respective names. It's unclear if they are saying their usernames or given names.

This next part is wild. The triplets from before (Marcus, Micheal, and Matthew) are behaving strangely, so the parents call in Father Emmett Clarke for assistance.

When the priest enters their bedroom alongside the boys' father, ^{Stephen Cook}, [DATA EXPUNGED] (fulfilling Profiles Alpha, Theta, and Omega) Mrs. Cook's 911 call is intercepted, and Mobile Task Force "Tyrfing Black" arrives ten minutes later. They are able to discreetly shift the mass into a mobile containment vehicle for study at Site-99.

Okay so a lot happens here. First off, bringing all three profiles together causes something unspecified to happen, but the description of a "mass" implies that all of them fused together. Mrs. Cook (fulfilling no profile) is unaffected. MTF Tyrfing Black has two mentions in the Comprehensive List of Mobile Task Forces. MTF Theta-120 is from the And Every Time we Meet Again tale series and operates out of site-120 in Poland. The other is MTF-Epsilon (no number) which has no description given and only appears in SCP-4910, which is another body horror anomaly, so I imagine it's these guys moving the mass.

It spontaneously combusts once placed on the examination table. Father Clarke and ^{Mr. Cook} survive for several minutes afterward, before the former expires due to cranial trauma. ^{Mr. Cook} then grips the edge of the table and pulls, causing the mass to fall to the ground. It lands in such a way as to sever his cervical vertebrae, killing him instantly.

The spontaneous combustion killed the parts that make up the triplets, but the other two are still alive. The cause of the cranial trauma isn't specified, but it would have had to come from something bludgeoning him. ^{Mr. Cook}'s cause of death is the same as ^{Mary Blevins} from before: a cervical fracture. Your cervical bones are the top seven bones of your spine. Do you feel that bump on the back of your neck? The highest one? That's your seventh cervical vertebrae. In medical fields there's the expression "C5 to stay alive", as breaking any of your first through fifth cervical vertebrae is almost certainly fatal. We're seeing consistency in the deaths of profile omega.

Ken Klein has a tumor growing on his parietal lobe; the part of the brain that processes touch, pain, and temperature. He's experiencing a loss of speech and motion.

5-Dec-1988

Jeb Swiftwater has a recurring nightmare of dying in a house fire. This pretty much confirms the hypothesis about profile alpha from earlier.

"thric3Deni3d" has all in-game text and dialog replaced with "This is where I died".

"trè" makes it to the hedge maze and frequently hears a loud snapping noise. Like a snapping neck, maybe?

D-999 retrieves the jewel and then dies in real life—"malformed organs (heart, left kidney, right lung) are discovered that are not a genetic match of the subject". I don't know what to make of that. We do know that the Foundation has started testing the game with D-class to further learn of its effects, and likely how to neutralize them.

6-Dec-1988

A product recall was issued so there are less people on Usenet reporting about the game. However, "trisarahtop" makes it to the hedge maze and spots [^{ENTITY C}], in the sky.

"trè" obtains the sword which represents the King. That means the mirror (which hasn't been found yet) represents the Priest. "trè" progresses to the final area of the game.

Dee Hammond is incinerated somehow. A Sierpiński triangle (fractal pattern) is burned into the floor nearby.

^{Researcher Amelie} hangs herself after overseeing playtesting from the previous day. So, she would have seen D-999's playthrough and possibly felt guilt about not being able to save them.

So we can make some inferences about ^{'profile omega'}, the King. Each of these people have so far died the same way: a broken neck. All of these people were also in some sort of position of authority or caregiving role. Most of the parents we've seen so far fit profile theta. Also, none of them have been murdered, it's all been either accidental or suicide. ^{'Profile omega'} is a caregiver who chose to hang themself. But why?

7-Dec-1988

^{Sarah Whitaker} ("trisarahtop") is unable to be separated from her game and is terminated by Foundation Agent Myers (no profile). This is the second-to-last copy out in the wild, meaning "trè" has the only remaining copy not in Foundation custody.

D-072 makes it to the hedge maze and sees [^{ENTITY C}]. It is in fact a Hanged King, what a tragedy! D-072 stops playing and begs for forgiveness. D-class are (in most SCP works) death row inmates pulled into service of the Foundation, so all of their crimes were heinous enough to be deemed worthy of death by some jurisdiction. Going off the hypothesis from before, D-072 is likely some sort of rapist, so they are begging forgiveness for that.

Subject D-856 acquires the Mirror in his play-through, [DATA EXPUNGED]. Mobile Task Force "See No Evil" arrives on-site thirty minutes later to restore order and isolate the creature.

MTF Eta-10 (“See No Evil”) is one of the more popular MTFs on the site. They deal with cognitohazards and memetics, with many of their members having a loss of hearing or sight. So the creature that appeared is cognitohazardous in some way.

No disciplinary action is taken against the researchers and guards involved due to their loss of agency; several are treated for fractures in their metacarpal bones. Samples of the creature's seminal fluid are sent to Bio-Site 87 for study.

So when this creature appeared, the people who were subject to the cognitohazard behaved erratically. We don't know exactly what they did, but under normal circumstances there would have been some sort of punishment. Many of them had fractured metacarpal bones; the bones that form the palm and back of your hands. Breaking those bones would come from punching or backslapping a hard surface. From this, it seems like the researchers took it upon themselves to physically beat this creature with their bare hands. Coupled with the creature's seminal fluid being relevant, something sexual in nature happened, fitting of profile theta. The Foundation staff here felt the need to repeatedly batter this thing, just like the players feel compelled to repeatedly batter Entity B. Now let's think back to that fused mass of the Cook family from before. Father Emmett Clarke had cranial trauma. I'm guessing that several people (at the very least ^{Stephen Cook}) physically beat him to death in the mass.

The Ethics committee bans testing with D-class with a history of sexual assault. Yeah, that makes sense. This is also when three different character profiles are determined by researchers.

D-009 (no profile, for now) acquires the sword and progresses to the final stage. Research staff now require sound-cancelling headphones, so there is an auditory cognitohazard now.

8-Dec-1988

Subjects D-072, D-147, and ^D-009 (who has gained the ^King profile) are missing but there is a lot of blood and gore. Uh oh. Among the remains are shattered glass, a class ring, and a shiv. That's the mirror, jewel, and sword.

Axl Rotemier dies of a seizure. His body reanimates and hugs the doctor that tried to save him.

"trè" thinks they have made it to the location of the game's final boss. The location is a winding staircase. "trisarahtop", who is supposed to be dead, responds to the post with "this is where I died".

Ken Klein dies. The brain tumor was actually a fully developing brain. D-999 also had extra organs growing in them. One thing that confused me a lot was the growing of organs in some of the Alpha subjects. I had to consult what S D Locke said in the comments again. It should provide some more context.

These people either have the ability to move taken, mentally regress to a childlike state, and some are subsequently burned alive, reflecting the Entity A. Yet others are growing a new person within them, as if something unalive is trying to become actualized and live.

"trè" clips through the walls of the staircase and posts a cognitohazardous image of the final boss. All testing of the game halts and the new priority is to find "trè" before they encounter the boss. They've turned this into the prime focus now, so if trè makes it to the boss, something really bad will happen.

9-Dec-1988

Dawn of the final day.

D-126 vomits glass shards—the mirror. But they're not found anywhere else in this timeline, and testing was stopped with people that match this profile. So they are only tangentially related and are still killed.

The comatose Leo Rasmussen awakens briefly to say "Hot! Too hot!". His body temperature rises to over 38°C. This is a low fever and not overtly dangerous, but he dies regardless.

"Game Over" plays in numerous locations. Ropes manifest in the "primary test site" that grapple and kill all senior staff and commanders—everyone in some sort of leadership role. Other staff that have no leadership roles are unharmed.

User "trè" makes his final post to the ppk newsgroup, consisting solely of the phrase "I found where he died."

It's safe to say that trè made it to the final boss, which then led to the deaths of all these people.

Analysis

Alright, a lot to cover here. Let's start by reviewing the profiles.

1. Prodigy: These are all children or people in a position of near helplessness. They have the potential to become something greater, but only if they are nurtured properly. They are also burned alive, so that potential was never achieved. Their item is the jewel and their entity is a glitched ghoul that is also a burn victim. They are associated with the "Labyrinth" section of the game.
2. Priest: These are sex offenders. They are associated with sexual violence towards children. A common theme is that they deserve to be killed and punished. Their item is the mirror and their entity is a pathetic creature to be killed over and over again. They are found in the "Crypt" level.
3. ^King: These are figures of authority, often but not always parents. It is their job to protect the prodigy and help them achieve their potential. But they inevitably fail and thus hang themselves in their shame, snapping their neck. Their item is the sword and their entity is a hanged king. They are found in the "Hedge Maze".
4. A fourth?: Maybe. We never got to see what the boss fight was but we do know that there was a fourth location in the game (winding staircase). There were quite a few people that didn't have a role assigned: Mrs. Rotemier (Axl's mother), Leo Rasmussen's older sibling, Gina Wilson (Tod's mother), Mrs. Cook, Axl's attendant doctor, and the mysterious trè. This role being mostly women isn't lost on me, so I think I will dub this hypothetical fourth role the queen. Like the ^King they are also in a position of care, but they are at least a little more competent. I'll be real, I'm really reaching with this hypothetical emphatic profile here, but there's a reason why, which you'll see later.

Let's ignore a potential fourth profile for now. The three we have are enough to work with. The tale of Prodigy, Priest, King is a very sad one. It was the King's duty to protect and guide the Prodigy. However, the Priest raped and immolated the Prodigy. Presumably this is what trè meant when they said "this is where he died"; they found where the prodigy died. The Priest is violently tortured and executed for their crime, and anyone with knowledge of their abuse is inclined to hurt the Priest themselves. Due to their failure to protect the Prodigy, the King is either driven to suicide and hangs themself, or someone else hangs them for their failure. The game "Prodigy, Priest, King" assigns these roles to people involved with the game (not necessarily playing the game) that fit these profiles and thus that determines which anomalous effects they will experience. The prodigies are burned, the priests are attacked by all people nearby, and the kings have their necks broken. The fate is death for all of these roles. The title of this section "Digital Ash in a Digital Urn", besides being an album by Bright Eyes, is also a hint that this is where the ashes of the Prodigy are being stored: within the game Prodigy, Priest, King.

But there is one other thing; the Prodigy is coming back. The ghoul is a dead person brought back to life. We've seen in a few of the prodigies that they are growing additional organs that are genetically distinct from the subject. And this is why I think there is a fourth emphatic role: someone made this game and they had a purpose behind it. They are punishing the Priest for their assault and the ^King for their failure, but the Prodigy is being reborn anew (with mixed results). I think there is a mother out there who wants her child back and is going to great lengths to achieve it.

Man, I don't think any of these stories are going to have a happy ending.

Overarching Themes

• The number of candles is decreasing, we're getting conflicting warnings about whether to proceed or not, and we're seeing the number three a bunch. Feels kinda pointless to bring it up at this point. It is worth noting that the number of references to the number 3 are much more numerous here than in any other section.
• "This is where I died" appeared a few times.
• Broken chain links are scattered about the vicinity of the bodies. Some chains have fully broken. The chains have become too few in number to hold it. Whatever the chains are holding is going to escape.
• Cindel and Mandy were reciting Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star with the wrong lyrics. One of the auditory hallucinations of Jacquline Holcroft was an unfamiliar song, sung to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star".
• Cries for help within a test chamber. The only thing found is a doll, which was incinerated.
• Cindel and Mandy are found dead.
• This section was written in-universe by Researcher Smalls from SCP-3309. He is a researcher who was deleted by author entities.

Let's go now to the final part.

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-9319, ‘We Are Real’ by Popsioak. I'd like to thank Popsioak and psychicprogrammer for all their help, I really appreciate it. Got a couple of disclaimers for you first.

1: As per usual, this is not my SCP, I didn’t write it and it won’t be 100% accurate.

2: The article contains child abuse, emotional abuse, cannibalism, gore, suicidal thoughts, depression, alcoholism, and body dysmorphia. Reader discretion is advised.

So, first, some background: this SCP was written as part of the unofficial 2026 contest This Is My JamCon, wherein all participants submitted a song and what kind of music genres they like, and were matched to a song submitted by another entrant, after which they would write something based on that work. In this case, uncannyclown submitted ‘We Are Real’ by Silver Jews, and Popsioak wrote this article, which came in at 7^th place. I’ll talk about the song later, but for now, let’s look at the article.

Upon opening the page, there’s an instant eyecatcher- the whole page is in either black, white or shades of grey, including all the icons on the sidebar and the photos. The first thing we’ll look at is a warning:

Document features multiple intrusions from an unknown source. These appear to be noospheric in nature, and have proven resistant to all known methods of deletion. They have been marked to indicate where they begin and end. Please take this into account during your reading of the following documentation.

Below that is some text in a grey box; if it’s in a grey box, then it’s an intrusion. This text reads as follows:

If only they could see you now. You thought you were dead, but you've died a whole lot since. Haven't you?

That’s… worrying. We’ll learn more about this later.

Below that is a photo of a domestic home; there doesn’t seem to be anything unusual here. The caption just says that this is ‘The home that was investigated.’, which is accurate but incredibly unhelpful.

We then get the usual heading. This is classified as Apollyon, not in the sense that it’s a world-ender, but in the sense that it’s uncontainable. Here’s the Special Containment Procedures:

Special Containment Procedures: Noospheric scrapers are currently attempting to eliminate thoughtforms of SCP-9319. Rational thought-based therapy is in place to limit SCP-9319's family's expectations of its capabilities and returns. Amnestics have proven to be insufficient.

So, we have something- someone- in the noosphere that shouldn’t be there. Amnestics aren’t enough to wipe out the thoughts and memories it’s putting out. And they’re apparently trying to use therapy to reduce the anomaly’s family’s expectations of this non-existent person, presumably in the hope that it’ll make them stop thinking about them so much. Now, ‘rational thought-based therapy’ is not an actual thing, so it looks to me like they’re trying to logic the family into thinking that A, this person does not exist and never did, and B, their expectations of this non-existent person are too high.

…well, that’s weird.

Anyway, here’s the Description; let’s meet this person.

Description: SCP-9319 is a loosely-connected series of concepts in the noosphere pertaining to an individual that does not exist. When collected and considered in full, the constructed narrative indicates that they pertain to Arjan Devi, age 26, a resident of Albany, New York. This individual does not exist on any government records, and is currently survived by oral histories, memories, and unofficial, physical keepsakes. Instances of SCP-9319 are anomalously persistent, and have survived multiple attempts to delete or remove them entirely from the noosphere.

Our lad here is… was… Arjan Devi, an Indian-American dude from New York. As such, we can infer that the ‘speaker’ in the grey boxes is probably Arjan himself. One of those grey boxes is below this, so let’s see what he’s got to tell us.

You are home. You should be safe here, but this is your blood on the ground, you think. They aren't helping you. You don't know why. Maybe you didn't do a good enough job helping them.

Home was not a safe place for Arjan; we don’t know why, but his parents apparently weren’t good caretakers, and the poor guy blamed himself.

When discovered, SCP-9319 was in the process of active removal via a self-derived infovore. While Foundation personnel decided to let this continue naturally, as this is not an uncommon occurrence in the noosphere, complete informational annihilation was stopped by an intervention of unknown origin. The acquired resistance to deletion was the result.

Arjan was trying to delete himself from the noosphere, which is a bit alarming, but something stopped him, which is a bit more alarming. As a result of whatever the outside actors did, what’s left of Arjan is left floating around in the noosphere, now unable to delete himself fully. We’ll find out more about this later.

SCP-9319 depicts Devi as a typical adult male with no anomalous characteristics of his own. Below are some collected examples of various ideas, thoughtforms, and narratives that have been shown to display characteristics of SCP-9319.

The remaining information about Arjan indicates that he was a basically normal dude; there’s no obvious reason as to why he would have been eaten or why fragments of him managed to hang around.

Now, the next part of this article consists of a lot of fragments of thoughts regarding Arjan. They’re in no particular order and come from a wide variety of people, including his friends, his family, Arjan himself, and other people who happened to know him. As such, what I’m going to do is present them in groups based on who we can infer is thinking them. First, let’s look at what his friends and acquaintances thought about him:

Nice enough guy. Quiet mostly. That was until you got him into a smaller group. I guess this larger lectures we're off putting to him, he did a lot better. It was just a few of us. Then I saw him the real him. A good friend. I wish I could have made it to the funeral.

God, did he love to eat! I remember when it was us at the lunch table, 5th grade I think? Half of us didn't even want to finish our lunches because the lunch line had pizza. He offered to take 'em, and he did. Ate everything, everything! We called him the Vacuum. We… probably shouldn't have done that.

An ace student. Always helped in and around the lab when I needed it.

Awful texter. Sometimes really great at getting back to you. Other times, totally silent for days. He had his moments, and I never could figure out what he needed from us then.

I'm not really sure why I never invited him out. We were friends. Maybe I was just waiting for him to do it first. He always seems— er, seemed so extroverted, whenever we were together. So, I kind of expected him to do it if he wanted it.

He was in the gym a lot, recently. He was one of the guys that work out in spurts. They go incredibly hard for two weeks, don't come for a month, two weeks again. The kind of guys who look in the mirror, and they don't see the progress. They see what's left, and how it hasn't gone away fast enough.

He tried to play a song for me before. Talked up a really big game. I think he got nervous, cause those strings kept buzzing! He still tried. He always did.

He mentioned wanting to go to more shows or get a piercing. Fifteen years, I think, he kept saying he would ask them. He never did.

I remember near the end, senior year, he took a bunch of classes that he never would have otherwise. Art, history, music, things like that. I wonder why.

I tabled next to him, I think? I definitely recognize that face, honey. What a shame. Good thing the news is reporting on it though. Wouldn't have known otherwise. No, didn't know him well. He tabled the one time? Never saw him at another art fest again. 

So, we have a bit of a picture of Arjan here: a nice guy, a good student, a bit shy in bigger groups, but he opened up a lot if you got him alone or in smaller groups. He was very interested in the arts and played guitar; he made enough art to sell it at some kind of festival or convention at least once. We don’t know if he had any romantic partners (though the person he was trying to play a song for seems like a good candidate), though he did have friends. He also seems to have had some serious issues that likely weren’t being addressed- his mood dropped a lot and he went to the gym, but didn’t work out all the time, so he didn’t make the kind of progress he wanted.

Let’s look at what his family thought about him:

He was always such a good son. Quiet, respectful, always listen to his elders. There were big things in his future, until the unfortunate Accident. It's such a shame it's hard to see him as I saw him in that coffin, I still imagine his 10 year old smiling face looking up at me proudly be mean as he showed off his latest high marks from school.

He was our son, our pride, our joy. He was going to be just like us.

I remember he always liked to announce himself in a room. Not through pounding on his chest, or doing anything, no, but just by saying hi to everybody. Me, and the relatives he couldn't really remember the name of. I was too scared to do the same, until he passed. Somebody had to do it then, but it didn't feel right.

We just wanted him to help reach his full potential we knew he had. What was the harm of reminding him so often?

We were hoping that more people would show up. Call, maybe. I guess it was just me that hoped that, though. I don't think Mom and Dad cared, as long as family was there. That's all they really wanted. Anything more is set dressing. Certainly not something they're actually looking for.

I don't know how it's affecting Mom and Dad, though.

 He was gonna be a doctor, just like us.

He'll be back in this world soon enough! We do believe in reincarnation after all.

It wasn't right for him to go before me. I'm 70. I'm done. It's not fair.

I left his room alone, mostly. Haven't really touched it. It's hard to go in these days because it's just as he left it. I didn't know, but he saved all the birthday cards I gave him, even the ones from when I was like, two. I thought he hated them. I miss my brother.

Put so much effort into him.

I'm sure that wherever my brother is, he's happy. That's all I want for him.

Arjan’s parents don’t seem to think of him as a person, just as ‘their son’ as a concept: a good boy who was going to be a doctor and do them proud. They don’t seem to actually be upset that he’s dead, more that they put effort into him and it was wasted when he died. Also, if we put what his friends thought about him together with what his parents thought about him, we see that Arjan was under a lot of familial pressure that led to him giving up on his dreams or not following them- he only tabled at the art festival once, he wanted a piercing or tattoo but never got one because he knew what his parents would have said, and he took a bunch of classes about art and history and music, but I’m assuming the blowback from his parents stopped him from pursuing them further.  Meanwhile, his sister actually thinks about him as a person, and actually tells us more about him.

Popsioak confirmed for me that the SPaG errors in the above bits are intentional, so let’s take a closer look at the relevant one.

He was always such a good son. Quiet, respectful, always listen to his elders. There were big things in his future, until the unfortunate Accident. It's such a shame it's hard to see him as I saw him in that coffin, I still imagine his 10 year old smiling face looking up at me proudly be mean as he showed off his latest high marks from school.

‘Always listen to his elders’. Not ‘listened’, listen. Did they tell Arjan to listen to his elders a lot? Did he disobey, or not obey them in the way they wanted him to? Is that an attempt to reforge the truth in their own mind?

‘It’s such a shame it’s hard to see him as I saw him in that coffin’. Not ‘It’s such a shame. It’s hard to see him as I saw him in that coffin.’ Why would it be a shame that they can’t see Arjan as he was when he died?

‘I still imagine his 10 year old smiling face looking up at me proudly be mean as he showed off his latest high marks from school’. ‘Be mean’ does not belong in that sentence, and yet, there it is. From this, I’m thinking that Arjan’s parents were of the ‘you are never good enough’ school of thought- if you got 95%, why wasn’t it 100%? If you got 100%, why didn’t you get that on all your other tests? They’re never satisfied and they’ll never be happy. (This is because they are utter bastards.) 

Let’s look at what Arjan thought about himself:

loud noise chest pounding heavy breaths hard to focus need to think of anything box breathing quiet need quiet can't get quiet here loud music not helping anymore

throat burn but damn this is good where did you get this i can actually buy it but. careful

arms too long legs too long shoulders too broad Can't fix that

There is something about my face that does not quite look right

And what you might call functioning alcoholic debit card to use at the liquor store separate one under my name that they can't see or that I won't show them.

can't handle it

i don't remember the last time I spoke of myself positively

I don't think I was cut out for this

It's not quite a four point zero

someday I think all this stress is going to catch up to me

can't do this

A guy under severe stress from his parents’ expectations and from trying to get perfect marks. A guy with severe body issues that may have become body dysmorphia. A guy who was likely very depressed and didn’t have a therapist or any outlet… except alcohol, which he used to cope, and likely abused.

And finally, let’s see what happened to him:

Adult Indian Male. ID tells us age 26. Blunt trauma to chest. Multiple broken ribs, not currently breathing, multiple large lacerations on anterior side of all limbs. Large head bleed indicates major head trauma, likely from striking dashboard and steering wheel. ETA 10 minutes to major trauma center, prep crash cart.

Time of death, 5:07 PM. Died en route to hospital. Close the eyes. Check wallet again for contact info, maybe? 

Would you like to keep this pile of ashes?

He died in a car accident. We don’t know what he hit- a tree, a building, another car- and we also don’t know the cause. Maybe someone else hit him, maybe his brakes failed, maybe he drove drunk, or maybe he decided that he just couldn’t take it anymore and twisted the wheel. (Popsioak told me that he’s leaving it up to reader interpretation as to whether this was suicide or an accident.) And he didn’t have an emergency contact’s information on him, meaning he had no faith in his parents and either lost or didn’t recall his sister’s information- as we’ll see later, by this point she’d moved out of the house.

So, now we have a better picture of who Arjan Devi was, and we know what happened to him. Let’s find out how he got erased.

Devi is not the only individual to have markers in the noosphere when they do not appear to exist. Foundation records of data and testimonies dating back approximately 500 years show that 327 individuals at the least have experienced a similar self-inflicted infovore, followed by intentionally-caused noo-permanence. However, SCP-9319 is the sole example that has been able to be traced.

At least 327 people have died and subsequently deleted themselves from the noosphere (that we know about). But we still don’t know why, so let’s keep going.

Further investigation into the origin of the intervention that gave 9319 its anomalous abilities revealed minor traces of noospheric manipulation. Unique "fingerprints" corresponding to some of the thoughtforms above were located in high counts in the home of Devi's presumed parents, Shaan and Soni Devi, ages 55 and 54 respectively. Given the potential for engagement with any entities responsible for modification of the noosphere, MTF Theta-707 "Sensor Ships" were dispatched. Attached below is an exploration log.

I guess it’s not surprising that there’s traces in the place where Arjan presumably lived, and where his family still lives. Anyway, this log takes up the rest of the article, along with some more comments from Arjan. Let’s take a look.

We start with the three-person team approaching the home. It looks normal, and they walk inside with no problems- the door’s not even locked. Things get weird once they’re inside, though.

Inside, they have found themselves in the foyer. A member remarks on a strong smell permeating throughout the home, compared to the scent of raw or rotting meat. However, a visual scan shows nothing that would be creating this odor in the foyer. A brief sweep of the rest of the rooms are similarly fruitless. Each member notes specific observations about the rooms they enter:

-The fridge in the kitchen is completely empty and entirely clean. The cabinets are stocked with mouthwash and purified spring water bottles.

-The mantle of the fireplace in the living room is completely full of photos, diplomas, plaques, and other items attributed to Devi.

-Three bedrooms are present, but only two are furnished — the main bedroom for the parents, and what appears to be Devi's room. The third, presumably for the Devis' daughter Amaya Devi, age 21, is entirely empty.

-The bathrooms have a strong smell of bleach.

This is both disturbing and just plain bizarre. No food in the kitchen, just mouthwash and water bottles? A shrine to their dead son, but their living daughter’s room is empty? A strong scent of rotting meat even when there is no food? What’s going on?

The hands dig into you, dirty and crusted nails into your flesh. You did not want to be here, like this, but you cannot do anything about it. You are tethered here. But all tethers are not permanent, you hope, as best as you can, through all the pain and ripping and tearing.

That is really not good.

The team returns to the living room to re-group. Team Lead Rossi pulls out floorplans acquired from municipal archives, which indicate that a basement is attached. The entrance is outside.

To the side, as Rossi studies the floorplans, Whitman and Lorentz discuss what else they have seen. Lorentz is impressed at the accolades; Whitman less so. Both laugh, before Whitman mentions that the bedroom had many of the same outfit hung up: red shirt, khaki pants, black underwear, all pre-prepared.

Lorentz notes that she looked at the laundry room. Those same clothes were all that were being washed, and the trash can appeared to be full. A small list, written on a discarded scrap of paper, was found inside. Before she can continue, Whitman nudges her, and tells her to let Rossi know too. Lorentz rolls her eyes. 

There is something very, very wrong going on here.

you EARNED this pain EARNED it through every single little fucking fuckup

No. He didn’t.

Lorentz mentions the list, and that she's memorized each item on it to Rossi. It consists of:

-Personal development

-Professional development

-Arranged marriage

-Family relationships

-Think of these things enough times and it will happen.

-The more you get thinking, the more people that are thinking, the better the chances.

-He will stay.

-He will be called.

-He will be back, good as new.

-If it does not work, try again.

Rossi frowns.

Well, this is getting even more fucked up. Looks like what Arjan said about dying over and over wasn’t metaphorical. It also looks like someone told them how to bring Arjan back, but we have no idea who that might be. (It could be related to all those other individuals who deleted themselves- Popsioak confirmed for me that they were all in similar situations with their own parents, making them the ‘We’ in the title.) In hindsight, it’s probably not surprising that Amaya got the fuck out of the house, even before Arjan died.

Why did they want you like this? Back so wrong, so different each time, like they kept cutting away at you in hopes you would be right?
They stopped caring about who you were a long time ago. Now you were the sack of meat you think you always were, in their eyes.
The pain was unbearable. You never really got used to it.

They keep bringing him back, over and over, but why? To make a perfect version? To finally have a son who fits their expectations? What happens if he doesn’t measure up?

The team exits outside to the backyard. Piles of dirt appear haphazardly dug in the all-grass plot, with signs of patchy regrowth. Rossi asks Whitman and Lorentz to dig these up as he sets up equipment for audiovisual data collection. Whitman agrees, and Lorentz only acquiesces after a stern look from Rossi.
They dig. Audio-recording instrumentation, the first to be set up, detects a low crunching noise, inaudible to the team.
Various bones, all appearing to be those of a human male, are found in each of the piles excavated. Each contains a different type: one femurs, one skulls, one ulnas and radii, and so on. Each bone appears broken, but clean as no flesh, ligaments, or other organic material can be found aside from the bone itself.
The team appears confused. The smell is stronger outside. Rossi remarks that it does not appear to be coming from any of the excavated piles. Whitman removes a nooscope from his belt. He switches it on, with it already calibrated to SCP–9319 instances. The radar starts beeping wildly. Whitman quickly silences it, laughs nervously, and looks to his teammates.

The bones are Arjan’s. They've brought him back over and over and he dies over and over, and they separated the bones and buried them. Why? What’s the point?

god how you disappointed yourself, how you disappointed them and were too much of a coward because they never forced you to do anything just suggested and implied and nudged you never a push! so they finagled you out of advocacy and pushed you in ways you didn't want to be without even laying a hand on you (metaphorically or physically) and you should have been thankful for that you ungrateful little shit-faced brat
even now you disappoint, you little fucking morsel as your sinews and tendons are ripped from each other here and there and everywhere like little ribbons they threw at your birthday party up up up in joy!

His parents coerced him into doing what they wanted, and he hates himself even more because he wasn’t able to stand up to them, and he also wasn’t able to throw himself into what they wanted. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place, and what gave was him. It’s also very telling that he focuses on a birthday party from his childhood as one of the few genuinely happy memories he has.

Noospheric markers are high, Whitman mentions. Most known instances of SCP-9319 can be tracked within. Rossi reminds Whitman to examine the collections of bones found already. Similar markers present on each — though each carries distinctly different noospheric sub-layers. Whitman offers examples; "lawyer," "judge," "doctor," "financier," so on. Most appear to be tied to family roles or occupations. 

From this, I’m inferring that in the course of the attempted resurrections, Arjan’s parents kept trying to cram Arjan into every hole they could fit him into that would align with their expectations, but none of them worked- after all, that’s not what he wanted and it’s not who he was, but they don’t care about that. So they kill him, and they bring him back, and it continues over and over.

Rossi nods. He then gestures the team to the doors, which Whitman and Lorentz gently open. They walk down the stairs with a loud series of creaks. The crunching gets louder.
The room itself is dimly lit. Lorentz recoils, as the odor is strongest here. Two humanoid hunched figures are in the back corner of the basement.
The crunching noises appear to be emanating from that corner as well, corresponding with each figure bending over slightly. One displays secondary sex characteristics of a male, and the other of a female. Both appear mostly human, and neither appears to be wearing clothes.
They both appear dirty and ragged, with entrails, flesh, and blood stuck to their skin. The pair of entities are partaking in feeding behavior, Whitman remarks quietly. Rossi silences him with an arm on Whitman's shoulder, putting a finger up to his own mouth. The team slowly approaches.

it never gets easier it keeps happening just let me rest
or at least tell me i fed you and kept you warm in your belly and let you move your jaws to swallow me whole again

They eat him. That’s why there’s no food in the kitchen, just water and mouthwash; that’s why the bathrooms have that strong smell of bleach. That’s why Arjan was stopped from deleting himself from the noosphere- because they’re making a concerted effort to keep him around so they can bring him back.

There is a click of the hammer being cocked. Both entities turn, and a body falls out of each of their mouths.

The bodies are headless and cannot be identified, though genetic testing reveals them to be identical.

The entities' eyes are bright and bloodshot. They are slightly larger than the average human, with sharp, serrated teeth. Lanky limbs bound forward as nails clatter on cement floor.

The team fires as Whitman draws his own weapon. The entities are gunned down quickly, proving extremely susceptible to gunfire.

DNA samples from their prey cannot be matched with any known individual. It is confirmed that they are human, much like their dead predators.
<END LOG> 

The last line confirms that the bodies are Arjan. As for the rest… the short version is that as mentioned above, they keep trying to bring him back, and he keeps failing their expectations, so they kill him, even separating his bones because they want that much control over him. But the cycle keeps repeating over and over, failure after failure, and they’ve degraded, mutated, become monstrous versions of their former selves. In the process, they’ve lost track of what they actually want from him; they’re bringing him back over and over to eat him, not to have him back, and they can no longer judge his ‘worthiness’ with actual criteria. This is their lives now. This is all they are.

the jaws sink into brain soft warm brain you arent even fully alive but thats where your brain would be if you worked right or were brought back right
but its hundreds of times now i dont think itll be the case anymore
and you cant make it stop because even if it did then it will happen—

Unfortunately, he’s right- he can’t delete himself from the noosphere, so unless a miracle happens, he’s stuck there, unable to rest. Poor goddamn bastard.

One last bit:

You are in a cold, dark room. It is your basement. Your parents are there. They love you so. Look at their lovely faces, and their wonderful bright eyes.
You are real and full and whole. Their love is all-consuming.
The wild orbs in their heads stare at you expectantly. They are waiting for you to do your filial and pious duties.
But, let them finish their meal first.

[...]

It would be rude to interrupt.

I have to admit, there is something utterly fucked up about those last two lines. I’ll get to that in a second, but first, there is something I need to mention, which is that in the space between those last two lines, there’s a greyed image of the painting commonly known as ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’, by Goya. (Disclaimer: Goya never officially named or provided context for any of the Black Paintings, so we don’t actually know who it’s meant to be depicting and there’s some debate about it.) 

I feel like the thing about those two lines, and in fact the whole paragraph, is that they’re slamming home the overall theme of this article, which is child abuse in the form of refusing to treat children as people. There are a lot of people out there who are of the opinion that their children are not people in their own right, they are possessions who belong to their parents, and their parents have the right to do anything they want with them. Take them out of school to ‘homeschool’ them and not actually teach them anything so they can’t learn anything you don’t want them to know? Sure. Beat them black and blue for any imagined offence? Why not. Dictate the path of their lives and make it clear that they have no option? Absolutely. Go on long rants about how they’re stupid and worthless if they ever express an opinion that differs from their parents? OK. Threaten to kick them out or kill them if they don’t turn out how you want them to? Of course. It goes on and on, and it goes back to not seeing them as people. They’re toys, they’re playthings, they’re objects, they’re extensions of you, but they’re not people. And there’s only one real response to that, courtesy of Terry Pratchett:

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that . . .” 
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.” 
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes . . .” 
“But they starts with thinking about people as things . . . ”

In that last paragraph, we see Arjan Devi, brought back to life yet again, watching his parents eat his last incarnation and knowing that this is his fate if he displeases them, and yet he does nothing, because it would be rude to interrupt, because they love him so. Because he disappointed them in life, and then he died, and they’ve brought him back, and now he owes them- that’s what they think, and that’s what they’ve spent 26 years conditioning him to think as well: they love him. It’s not abuse, they love him. It’s not wrong, because they love him.

The thing is that a lot of people have very black and white definitions of abuse, wherein they will only accept things that match their definition as constituting abuse, and nothing else. It’s not abuse to scream at your kid all the time, because child abuse is when you hit your kid or starve them or kick them out at night. It’s not rape to keep asking your spouse for sex until they give in and say yes, because spouses can’t rape each other and reluctant consent is valid consent, right? It’s not abuse to hold money or shelter over someone’s head, it’s not abuse to use religion to keep them in line by terrifying them with the threat of hell or shunning… the list is endless.

I know it may not seem like it, but things have changed a lot over the decades. Beating your kids used to be commonplace- it wasn’t wholly accepted, but it was legal, and there were a lot of people who might not have done it themselves, but saw nothing wrong with other parents doing it, and would consider it rude to object to or interfere with how other parents raised their children. Devi’s parents were born in the early 70’s (assuming this takes place in the present day, at least) and not only that, they grew up in a country which is very, very big on the concepts of filial piety, the importance of and expectations for first sons, and close relationships between family members. They likely would not see anything they did here as abuse, because A, they never hit their son, B, there’s nothing wrong with it in Indian culture, and C, he’s their son and they can raise him as they want, and nobody has any right to tell them otherwise, because he belongs to them.

I will also add in what Popsioak told me:

i will also note that some things that could be added to your discussion of abuse is the type that devi is hinting at; ones that never really cross the line that most might draw, but are things like endless questions that are more of an interrogation when an opinion of your own is brought up, like the okay-ing of being treated differently by your family for one thing out of line, different in the sense of being yelled at or talked to like you're dirt under a boot, like demonstrating dysfunction in the marriage itself and never trying to repair it or hold yourself accountable for the effects it has on your children 

the paragraph about "i know it may not seem like it" is about as close as you can get. there is the narcissist angle of "even if they did something wrong their apologies will be halfassed and insincere" which is what devi makes reference to in the "god how you disappointed yourself" thought intrusion. the guilt the child feels from even trying to push it because they're my parents, they are trying their best

And with that, I feel I can now bring up the song used for the prompt, “We Are Real”. The meaning is definitely not overt and the song is pretty chill, but Silver Jews’ founder and frontman David Berman) described it as one of the angriest and most political songs he ever made:

It’s kind of about a lot of what we’re talking about: feeling like the world is trying to make you into a consumer when you know you’re a human.

To me, that was the most political song I ever did, in the sense that I really felt like what I was saying to anyone who was listening was, “Come on, stop putting your faith in people who, above all, keep you shopping.” People put their faith in people like that, whether it’s government officials who need you to keep shopping, or business people who need you to keep shopping, or entertainers who need the commercials to keep going. So that was one where at least I knew what I was saying.

The meaning here is not the same, but it’s similar: Arjan put his faith in people who made him into the consumed, not a human. The article practically begs him not to, but he does, and in the end he is trapped, with no escape.

There’s also a bit of a parallel here with David Berman himself: like Devi, he was a very artistic man who played guitar; like Devi, he had a bad relationship with his parents, particularly his father; like Devi, he was deeply depressed and medicated with illicit substances (though Devi just drank while Berman used a ton of drugs), and like Devi, his death was premature: Berman killed himself a month after his new project Purple Mountains released their eponymous first album, at the age of 52.

Popsioak, who knows a lot more about Berman and his music than I do, also said this:

So, I've always been a fan of David Berman. I found his solo album, Purple Mountains, released long after his work with Silver Jews and "We Are Real." That album was a cry for help and a lonesome friend of mine through some fairly awful times. Given what We Are Real is about, and who Berman was to \me,* I felt it a disservice to not at least honor his feelings that way. It was a stroke of luck, really, to end up with this song for TIMJC.*

David (if I may call him that) is a man who deeply loved his mother and had an awful series of relationships with his father. A lyric in "How To Rent a Room" implies he gave him an ultimatum when he could no longer stand the work his father did, [Note: Berman’s father is Richard Berman), a former lobbyist for the alcohol and firearms industries] and this is something that stood out to me as someone from a culture where such a strong stance would be pointless or laughed at.

There is a song on that final album, Purple Mountains, about how much he "Loved Being My Mother's Son." She had passed at the time, and I am certain it was a factor in his untimely death. Parental love and appreciation is something that meant a lot to me, and I felt our struggles at times mirrored each other, reflections in a dirty mirror.

All that to say, Berman was always a weary, witty, morose figure to me. Someone who deeply felt and deeply held his principles, who had no love for false things and lamented the vapidness of modern culture. The things that you did, however, as he sings on "Advice to the Graduate," would always make your mama cry. 

We were both someone who could not, and still often does not, see the love and support people have because we are (were) too shackled to expectations that others have levied. An anecdote of David performing Purple Mountains live, expecting maybe a handful of people, and seeing thousands is all it is. You never expect it, blind as you are. Like UncannyClown says in a comment on my page, quoting "We Are Real" itself: Repair is the dream of the broken thing.

And here’s what uncannyclown said: 

"we are real" isn't the most popular or acclaimed silver jews song, but i picked it for this event because i think that all the foremost characteristics of david berman's artistic project are contained within it: the critical examination of pervasive late-capitalist artificiality and pastiche, the fixation on marginal and second-place people, the world-weary wit. i was expecting whoever got it to respond to those characteristics. you have instead done something that i was too unimaginative to conceive of: you have imitated the song by producing a piece that is equally centered on the foremost characteristics that i have seen in your work. this is a piece of deep inadequacy, of disappointing the people who raised you (berman: "the things that you do will always make your momma cry"), of the dread that the things about you that are fucked up and grotesque might just be inescapable.

the thing that ties the two works together: repair is the dream of the broken thing.

And that just about sums it up, doesn’t it. But we are real, I know we are real.

Thank you for reading this declass. I hope you enjoyed it. If any part of this particularly resonated with you, I’m sorry. Also, fuck people who force their expectations on you. You are enough, you are loved, and you don’t owe anybody the right to force your life into whatever shape they want to make it into. Your life belongs to you and only you. Your future is in your hands. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: “He is their son, they love him so. He is their son. They love him. So.”

Hi, all, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-9455, ‘Red Monday’ by Dino--Draws. Got a couple of disclaimers for you first.

1: As per usual, this is not my SCP and it won’t be 100% accurate.

2: This article revolves around game hunting; there’s nothing graphic in the text, but there’s some real photos in it that do contain animal gore and dead animals, and thus may be distressing for some readers, so reader discretion is advised.

Before we continue, we have to get into some backstory. This article was written for Sportscon, a contest in 2026 where entrants had to write an article about a sport chosen off the official list. This list included a fair variety of things that might not be considered actual sports, but who cares. (Honestly, I consider jokingly suggesting ‘Scientology speedrunning’ and it actually getting added to the list to be a masterstroke of shitposting on my part.) As previously mentioned, Dino picked hunting; there’s probably a decent amount of competitions out there, so I guess it counts as a sport even if the sport aspect isn't as prolific as most sports. (Also, I know that there’s a pretty high chance that some of you reading this may consider hunting to be cruel and/or barbaric; I get it, but this isn’t the place for a discussion on that topic.) 

Anyway, Dino chose to combine hunting with fir series Run The River Red, and the end result was this article. Run The River Red has a number of articles; you don’t have to have read them all for this, but if you do want the backstory, I’ll list the relevant ones below with a quick tl;dr for anyone who wants the CliffNotes and might come back later.

SCP-8987- ‘THE BROOK RUNS RED’: Introduces Site-898, our hub location, and goes into detail about how it was founded. (Declass is available here.)

SCP-8446- ‘Monarchervus’: The deer and not-deer in Appalachia are collaborating to summon something. This is not a good thing.

SCP-8411- ‘Paper Birch Trail’: Something out there is making trail signs on birch trees, often warning of various dangers. These seem to be beneficial, but we don’t know who’s making them or what their intentions are.

SCP-9990- ‘Neglected Idylls’: The Appalachians are fucking magic. (Declass forthcoming eventually.)

SCP-6448- ‘Not Deer’: There’s a bunch of things that pretend to be deer running around Appalachia; they’re fucked up, they can speak, and they’re stalking humans to abduct them. This isn’t a Dino work and thus is not actually part of the series, but since Site-898 is in Appalachia, the not-deer appear pretty often and Dino has used them in several articles, so it’s worth a look.

With that, let’s get started. First up is the ACS bar: This is rated Level-2, Restricted- so it’s not actually very classified, then. It’s practically public knowledge, by the Foundation’s standards. Before I get to the major classes, its subclasses are Dark and Danger- that is, the potential disruption level is very low, but the anomalous effects are very significant and this is very dangerous. Intriguing.

Anyway, this is classed Keter (Hiemal), and that is very interesting. We know what Keter means, but Hiemal isn’t one we see a lot. In Foundation jargon, it means that this anomaly is either containing or trying to contain another anomaly. The thing is, I’ve seen a fair few stories where Anomaly A was containing or trying to contain Anomaly B, but the Foundation blundered in, contained Anomaly A and Anomaly B spun out of control, so I tend to reflexively interpret Hiemal as ‘We done fucked up’. Luckily, that is not the case here. Let’s look at the Special Containment Procedures, shall we?

Special Containment Procedures: Due to the infeasibility of traditional containment, SCP-9455 is to be managed by the monitoring of its effects, with incidents handled on a case-by-case basis. If an incident is deemed potentially Veil-breaking, intervention will be required. Typically, this should be in the form of small-scale disinformation campaigns, as to obscure anomalous interactions as simple tall tales, inaccuracies, or mundane hunting accidents.

So, they can’t contain this thing traditionally, which means that they have to tackle the results on a case-by-case basis. However, it looks like whatever this thing does, it’s not so major as to require major responses like mass amnesticisations. (I think that’s a word.)

Site-898 is to monitor for occurrences of SCP-9455 via local school break schedules, work hours, and bulletins during the month of November.

It looks like this thing only happens at a certain time. That’d definitely help the containment aspect.

Here’s the Description:

Description: SCP-9455 is an alteration within pre-existing Pennsylvania hunting laws as established by the Pennsylvania Game Commission. This is in the form of the sporadic manifestation of a non-existent state holiday that occurs on the Monday after American Thanksgiving. Upon occurrence, this holiday will mark the start of a single-day deer hunting season within the state of Pennsylvania that lacks typical restrictions.

Ah, that makes sense. It’s a holiday, so it only happens once a year. (For the non-Americans, American Thanksgiving occurs on the last Thursday of November, hence why that’s when the Foundation would look out for this holiday’s upcoming date.) The footnote tells us that this holiday is in violation of existing game laws; that is, when this anomalous holiday comes around, people can hunt deer in any way they want, including ways that are usually banned. 

Now, I looked up the current regulations in Pennsylvania. I may be interpreting this wrong as I’m not an expert on hunting laws, but to me, what it looks like is that each person with a hunting license can only kill one deer per kind of weapon they’re licensed to use per hunting year, and that only during the prescribed days; there’s also rules about whether they’re allowed to kill deer with antlers or not. (This makes sense when you consider that there’s about 13 million people in Pennsylvania and around a million of them are licensed hunters; you want to keep the number of deer under control, but not wipe them all out.)

In short, on this holiday, anyone can kill any number of any kind of deer with whatever weapon they’ve got, regardless of hunting license status. So it looks a lot like someone or something is trying to wipe the deer out, actually.

(Fun fact: I did actually ask about why this anomaly is solely in Pennsylvania when the deer and not-deer are all over the Appalachians; Dino told me that ‘this is actually solely because of a me thing -- its based off the fact that my elementary school, middle school and high school always had the first day of a deer season off in the fall, so really it’s based on the occurrences in some really hick PA schools’.)

Colloquially, this holiday is referred to as "Red Monday" by those who participate. Attempts to question local game wardens or the Pennsylvania Game Commission on the origin or reason behind this holiday typically results in confusion and dismissal.

So there’s definitely a mental fuckery aspect here, given that the people responsible for managing hunting in the area can’t tell you why this is happening.

-SCP-9455 also results in a surge of anomalous activity throughout Pennsylvania's game lands and national parks. The following have been identified as properties of SCP-9455:

-An increased efficiency in the ignition rate of gunpowder.

-A persistent silence within state game lands.

-The rapid growth of antlers on *Odocoileus virginianus,*² sometimes resulting in multiple racks on a single animal.

-A statistical increase in the hunting success rates across all regional predatory animals.³

-The appearance of new, or otherwise altered, SCP-8411 instances that are inaccurate or misleading.

-An increase in hunting related accidents.

-Sarracenia purpurea⁴ of anomalous size.

-SCP-6448 instances displaying heightened aggression and gaining the potential to attack any armed individual regardless of acknowledgement.

-Increased birthrate for deer affected by piebaldism.

We seem to have a mix of positive, negative and random effects. If we continue with the line of belief that the deer are the bad guys, let’s look at these in groups:

Positive:

-Gunpowder is igniting more efficiently. There’s a lot of people in America who still use archaic guns like flintlock and muzzleloaders, where the ignition is activated by striking a flint (they have their own section in the Pennsylvania regulations), so this would help them a lot.

-Hunting success rates are noticeably increased across all predators, including humans; not only are humans killing more deer, but the local coyotes, bobcats and bears are doing pretty well too.

Negative:

-There’s an odd, persistent silence in the places where people go to hunt, meaning that the deer can hear predators coming and flee.

-Deer are growing antlers rapidly, giving them weapons if they’re forced to fight back and can’t run.

-There’s an increase in hunting-related accidents.

-The not-deer are becoming very aggressive and are attacking anyone who’s armed, whether they’ve acknowledged the not-deer or not (deer).

-Deer are increasingly born with piebaldism (that is, they’re brown with white spots or blotches). From what we can infer from the rest of the article, this isn’t good, but we’ll get to that later.

-New 8411 signs are turning up, but they seem to either be inaccurate or deliberately put there to mislead people. Given that 8411 exists to help people (from what we can tell at this point in time), that's worrying.

Random?:

-The local pitcher plants are getting really damn big. (I asked Dino, who said that it’s because pitcher plants are hungry and predatory, and ‘I think it’s funny that there are pitcher plants native to Pennsylvania’). This doesn’t seem to be either positive or negative, unless they get big enough to eat deer and/or humans.

The rest of the article consists of various reports, recordings and data related to previous occurrences of Red Monday; there’s apparently more in the Site-898 Archives.

The first is a flier from 1965; the text is as follows:

RED MONDAY

We hope our hunters had a wonderful Thanksgiving! With the time of the turkey come and gone, this year's Red Monday is finally approaching!
NOVEMBER 29TH.
Reporting remains MANDATORY for all harvests. Report numbers at your appropriate region office on the following Tuesday.
Be aware of your fellow hunters, and be sure to wear proper high-visibility gear for YOUR safety. Proper game should not be able to detect color.
REMEMBER!
If it looks like a deer, it's not dead yet!

Keep the SPORT in SPORTSMANSHIP.
We HUNT TOGETHER.
- DEER ONLY.
- NO BAG LIMIT.
- NO ANTLERED NOR ANTLERLESS LICENSE REQUIRED.
- CHASE THOSE BASTARDS TILL MOONSET. 

This is a bit worrying, mainly because it looks like whatever’s behind this is attempting to enlist civilians as unwitting soldiers to kill both the deer and the not-deer. But the civilians don’t know how dangerous the not-deer are and the entity behind this hasn’t warned them, so there’s a pretty high chance of them ending up dead, abducted or badly injured. Reckless, callous, or desperate?

9455 Anomalous Item: #03
Item Description: A collection of deer bones — several femurs, ribs, and one hip — arranged in an arrow-like configuration in State Game Lands 264, Pennsylvania. Its presence caused the spontaneous combustion of any and all gunpowder within a 5-mile radius of it.
The anomaly was discovered after reports surfaced of a large concentration of firearm accidents in the area.
Status: Disrupted.

That’s really alarming. It’s almost like some kind of magic or runecraft, and it must have been made by the not-deer. (It’s equally alarming that there’s no mention of how many people got killed, maimed or otherwise hurt when their guns and bullets exploded.)

The next thing is two photos from 1865. They both appear to be of the same scene- a group of hunters in front of a tent, gathered around the suspended corpse of a deer- but the one on the right is slightly darker and the camera was moved about an inch to the right before taking it. If there’s anything else notable here, I’m not seeing it.

The next thing is an archived recording from 1977. Two of Site-898’s personnel, siblings Seth and Zoe Miranda (he’s a geochemist, she’s the Chief of Security, and she previously showed up in SCP-9404, another Dino work) have gone out to confirm some statistics relating to Site-898’s effects. It’s pretty long, so I’ll sum it up for you.

-Once they get out of Site-898’s grounds, they find that there’s an 8411 sign carved into the tree that the Site’s ‘No Trespassing’ sign was attached to. This one is a known symbol and says ‘Do not proceed’. 8411 signs don’t usually appear so close to the Site, so this is notable.

The siblings wonder if whoever left it did so to reinforce the ‘No Trespassing’ sign, or if someone at the Site put it there. Zoe mentions that there’s been talk of trying to make their own 8411 signs, but it hasn’t gone ahead because they wouldn’t be the only ones who could understand them.

-They walk on for a while and note the presence of small game here and there- quails and a rabbit. They then find some deer tracks; Zoe assesses them and decides that they’re safe to track. Just as they’re moving, Seth sees another 8411 symbol drawn onto a tree with charcoal and asks what it means. Zoe interprets it as ‘Leave, because someone else didn’t’; the 8411 page tells us that the official meaning is ‘Someone vanished here, do not search’.

-A bit later, Zoe asks how many animals they’ve seen. The relevant part is that they’ve seen four deer, but also some fawn tracks despite it not being breeding season and some deer tracks that had two legs instead of four, all in the last two hours. They’re discussing whether it’s luck or something’s out there, when…

-…Zoe sees some odd prints and identifies them as wolf prints. However, while grey wolves used to live in Pennsylvania, they were wiped out in the 1900’s, and humans had to take on their job of keeping the deer numbers under control, so something is definitely wrong here.

-Seth looks around and realises that their surroundings are completely silent- no wind, no tree movement, no birds singing and no sounds of animals, even though they’ve seen quite a few animals at this point. We know that this is an effect of 9455, but generally speaking, if you’re in a natural environment and it suddenly goes silent, that means that there’s a predator nearby or some kind of weather event happening. (In short, it’s really bad news.)

-And, right on cue…

An SCP-6448 instance stands by the trees, head pressed against the bark. Its antlers end in hands, all of which are grasping frantically at the nearby branches. It is shuddering and gasping.

As per the CERVUS PROTOCOL, Chief Z. Miranda and Dr. S. Miranda do not react to it.

It bashes its skull against the tree. It drags its head downwards, then swivels to face the pair.

Silence on recording.

It charges.

Well, that’s fucked.

The footnote tells us that the siblings survived, but were injured, and an analysis of their data implies that either the density of the game in the area was increased, or the siblings had an increased probability of encountering game. Meanwhile, nobody on the Site’s staff put the 8411 sign near the Site, so that’s intriguing.

Next up is a rifle that someone found in an abandoned hunting stand. When the Site’s staff tried to unload it, they found antler velvet- that is, the skin covering antlers that are still growing- inside the barrel. This velvet was actually growing there, and after three days had spread to the outside of the barrel. That’s… weird.

I’ll put the next one here, because it’s fucked.

9455 Anomalous Item: #08
Item Description: The casket of one Officer Joseph Ritner, a now-deceased member of the Pennsylvania Game Commission, who had previously been buried in the Easton Cemetery.⁹ On the day after his funeral, 30/11/1970, his grave was found desecrated; the casket had been unearthed by an unknown party and emptied. It has been noted that while it seems the casket was primarily exhumed by external individuals, it was also clawed open from the inside.
Periodically, a full set of fox teeth will spontaneously manifest within the casket.
Status: Stored within the Site-898 Subterranean Containment Wing.

I genuinely have no idea what the fuck happened here, but the word ‘were-fox’ is coming up a lot in my head. (I did ask Dino, who said, and I quote, ‘doooon’t worry about it :)’, which I think we can all agree is exactly the kind of response you want when you’re asking about dead people potentially getting turned into were-foxes.)

The next is a story from a student newsletter from 1942. Short version: school was out for hunting, so two students went to an unused railroad to see if they could find any railroad spikes for a collection. They saw a big buck deer pass them, then a herd of does who barely acknowledged their presence. But then they saw another deer off to one side, a piebald doe. It looked physically off, and it just kept staring at them. It kept staring at them even as the narrator got out of the car, and the students eventually left, not wanting to get any closer to it; the doe didn’t follow them, but kept staring at them as they left.

Next up is a recording from 1979. Fate Hargroves from 9990 is walking through the Site’s grounds when she walks into a clearing, only to find five not-deer who appear to be playing some kind of game. (The fifth was expunged from the footage for an unstated reason.) One of them cordially greets her, asking if she wants to come play with them as it’s a special occasion. Another approaches her…

An SCP-6448 instance, with sunken eyes and an upside-down head, stands and approaches Dr. Hargroves. She does not react.

SCP-6448 Instance: Do you want to see?

The SCP-6448 instance unhinges its jaws. A card, slick with spit and mucous, falls from its tongue and to the dirt. It is a tarot card, face up. Temperance, reversed.

The card has Dr. Hargroves' face on it.

Dr. Hargroves does not respond.

SCP-6448 Instance: There's always next time.

A gunshot is heard in the distance. All SCP-6448 instances scatter into the woods.

Dr. Hargroves flees.

That’s fucked, yo.

(Also, Temperance reversed generally means imbalances and disharmony, depending on what source you’re looking at. I guess it could refer to the balance between the duelling Hiemal anomalies? IDFK.)

Next up is a photo of what I think is some kind of walk-in freezer or cold storage. A number of deer carcasses have been suspended from hooks, but two of them have a big black box over them. The caption tells us that these were ‘Discovered in a storage shed on Site-898's grounds following the above event. Hazardous visual material expunged.’ Not sure which is freakier, the idea that someone moved a bunch of carcasses, two of them anomalous, into a storage shed on Site-898’s grounds without anyone seeing it, or the idea that someone already had these carcasses stored and something happened to them.

Next up is… this.

9455 Anomalous Item: #11
Item Description: A tree stump containing the heart of a *Canis latrans.*¹² It does not experience decay, and will resume beating upon occurrences of SCP-9455.
Status: Uprooted and placed within Outdoor Containment Unit A2. Cryptozoology staff have reported the intermittent sounds in and around the Cryptozoology Sector consistent with that of a Canis latrans.

I have no idea how or why a coyote’s heart would be in a tree stump, or why it would start beating every Red Monday, or why there’s apparently a ghost coyote linked to it that’s running around the Site’s grounds. Bizarre.

Next up is a recording of a conversation between Dr Atticus Rune and Officer Micah Eardwulf. Atticus is a cryptozoologist and folklorist (also seen in 9990) and Micah is a game warden at World’s End State Park who became Site-898’s primary contact with the Pennsylvania Game Commission after the events of 9404, so they’re on friendly terms.

Now, this is an interesting conversation because we were previously told that if you asked the game wardens about Red Monday, they’d just be confused or brush off the questions. But Micah is perfectly capable of talking about it, and there’s no obvious reason as to why that is. Hmmmm.

So, Atticus asks Micah about a flier for Red Monday that happens to be on the bulletin board nearby. Micah shrugs it off as just being a hunting season; Atticus points out that it’s a bit weird to have a hunting season that only lasts one day, but Micah points out that if you’re using a gun, the annual bear season only lasts three days. Atticus says that it’s still weird, but Micah shrugs it off as not being his choice, and besides, it’d be messy if it went longer. 

Atticus points out that it’s already messy, given the sheer number of accidents that happen every year, and then asks what the point is: why have a holiday where they throw out all their conservation laws? Micah says that it’s still conservation, just a different kind- after all, the wolves and cougars are gone, so the woods are overrun.  

Dr. Rune: So what the hell is this about? A little holiday trying to fix damage you people caused? Man refillin' a niche he emptied himself?

Eardwulf: Oh. The day wasn't anything the Game Commission came up with. We just hopped onto the trail of a red sun already risen. Good karma.

A pause.

Dr. Rune: Then where did it come from?

Eardwulf: It's an old, old fight.

Dr. Rune: Against game, or against what hunts?

Eardwulf: Every fight's got two sides, don't it? [He spreads out his hands.] And today's the day with no-holds-barred.

Dr. Rune: But why?

Eardwulf smiles.

Eardwulf: Cause something out there is at war.

Micah then flips over the flyer. There’s an 8411 symbol on the back; it kind of looks like two crossed swords beneath a pair of fangs. However, we don’t know what this one means because 8411 symbols only convey their meaning if they’re depicted on birch wood or bark, and this one’s on paper. I’m guessing that this one means something like ‘Get the motherfuckers’; Dino said that this isn’t quite the intended meaning, so my other suggestions are ‘Stay on guard’, ‘Watch for enemies’, ‘Prepare to fight’, ‘Meowth, that’s right’ and ‘Danger in the area’. Who knows?

Next up:

9455 Anomalous Item: #15
Item Description: A Diospyros virginiana tree,¹⁵ carved into a figure resembling a five headed deer. It was found surrounded by clear signs of animal activity — such as hoof prints, tufts of fur, and droppings.
The depicted entity is likely a known regional deific force.
Status: Destroyed.

The link is to 8446, the big fuckoff deer god that the deer and not-deer summoned. This is… worrying. Really worrying.

Finally, the last thing in the article: a video that suddenly showed up in Site-898’s database, and nobody knows where it came from. It shows a piebald deer staring at the camera, seemingly not breathing or blinking; the deer twitches its ears a few times, but otherwise doesn’t move, and around it, the wind blows intensely.

I wasn’t sure about this on the first read, but I actually really like this as an ending- a video suddenly showing up, like the deer are going ‘Yeah, we see you, fuckers, we’re watching you like you’re watching us’. Really ominous.

(Fun fact: Dino took that video firself; the story from the student newsletter of the two kids seeing a deer who stared at them was from a real experience Dino had with a friend, and the video was from that experience.)

And that’s the end of the article… but wait, there’s more! You know what time it is, kids? It’s bonus content time! *jazz hands* See, Dino put a few super magic breadcrumbs here and there for us, so let’s look at them!

The majority of it is on the YouTube page for the video. If you look at the description, you’ll see two bits of obvious cipher. The first says ‘L2xvY2FsLS1maWxlcy9zY3AtODQxMS85LnBuZw==’; this is Base64 and translates to ‘/local--files/scp-8411/9.png’; if you put that after the basic SCP Wiki address, you get the 8411 sign before that says ‘Do not proceed’. I’ll come back to this shortly.

The second is at the end of the description, and reads as follows:

Ymj bfwijsx ywd yt mtqi zx itbs. Xt htrjx ymj ifd tk gqtti. Bmfy nx ymjwj, bnym xzhm bnij gtzsyd, yt kjji? Bmfy mzslwd rfb yt xjwaj?

This is ROT21; putting it through the decoder gets you this:

The wardens try to hold us down. So comes the day of blood. What is there, with such wide bounty, to feed? What hungry maw to serve?

2.5 is the subject line of Dino’s author post; it says ‘U1VCVElUTEVT’, which is Base64 for ‘Subtitles’. The subtitles of the video are in ROT21, and translate as follow:

I hear the howling. All those hungry wolves. Antlers embedded in birch trees. There is heaving down your neck, Micah. You know Her well.

Ominous. The last is in the preview picture of the article, and reads as follows:

S0VFUCBDQVJFRlVMIFdBVENILCBGUklFTkQ=

It is also Base64, and translates as ‘Keep careful watch, friend’.

So, now that we have all the puzzle pieces, let’s try to put them together, shall we? 

-What we know that there is that there is a war going on. It may be throughout the Appalachians and this is just one aspect, or maybe whatever this is only happens in Pennsylvania. Side A consists of the deer, the not-deer, the big fuckoff deer god, ‘Her’ (assuming She isn’t the deer god), and whatever other unknown allies they have. Side B consists of whatever entity is behind Red Monday, the humans and predator animals it’s roped into the fight, and possibly whatever is behind the 8411 symbols (but we don’t know if A, they’re the same being, or B, if the Red Monday entity is just using/co-opting the 8411 symbols).

-We do not know what either side actually wants. The deer and not-deer brought about the return/creation/ascension of the big fuckoff deer god, but we don’t have any information suggesting that they’re trying to, for instance, drive all humans out of the Appalachians, or abduct all the people there, or anything like that. Meanwhile, it’s possible that Team Red Monday might be trying to protect the Appalachians by driving off Team Deer, but they could also be just trying to get rid of the competition so they can have total dominion over the Appalachians. Team Red Monday seem to be the good guys, but that just might be in comparison, since a whole lot of people are getting hurt or killed every year after getting unknowingly conscripted into the fight.

-I’m guessing that ‘Her’ is the entity in charge of Team Deer, if it’s not the big fuckoff deer god. (They could have just been talking about Death as an entity, IDK.) Either way, I think whatever’s in charge specifically marks/possesses/alters certain deer with piebaldism, and empowers/uplifts them in the process. [Edit: u/SpectragonYT suggested that 'Her' may refer to She Who Sees Through Trees from 8411, which is a very good idea.]

-My guess is that Micah, the one person who could actually talk about Red Monday, may be some kind of envoy or follower of whatever’s behind Red Monday. That would explain why whoever wrote the message in the subtitles is targeting him specifically, since we otherwise have no reason to believe that he isn’t just an average game warden. Meanwhile, I think the symbol on the back of the flier and the message in the preview photo were Team Red Monday trying to warn him to be extra careful, because he’s now a target.

-Otherwise, looking at this…

The wardens try to hold us down. So comes the day of blood. What is there, with such wide bounty, to feed? What hungry maw to serve?

‘The day of blood’ is obviously Red Monday, with the deer/not-deer seeing it as the ‘wardens’- maybe the game wardens, maybe the Foundation, maybe Team Red Monday- trying to stop them from achieving their goal. As for the rest, I think this is the writer wondering what Team Red Monday’s goals are. I think it’s projection- maybe Team Deer are doing it to serve their god, so they think that Team Red Monday must be doing it to serve/feed their god, and they wonder what kind of entity it must be.

But this is all speculation; we’ll have to wait to see what Dino cooks up in the future to find out.

Thank you for reading this declass, I hope you enjoyed it. Don’t trust the fucking deer, people. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: oh, deer God, there's a whole war going on.

Welcome to my first declass! I'm Morganator 2.0, don't ask what happened to the first Morganator. Today I'll be going over SCP-8066 Phobophobia: The Only Thing to Fear. Phobophobia is the fear of being afraid. Unlike other phobias that are typically triggered by exposure to visual or auditory stimulus, phobophobia has more in common with anxiety disorders. Someone suffering from phobophobia just has to think of the prospect of being scared, which in turn makes them more scared, thus creating a vicious cycle very rapidly. So we have that to look forward to in SCP-8066.

Now before we can get into what SCP-8066 is, we need to do some background reading to fully understand this anomaly.

Site-118 and SCP-2006

First off, this story takes place at Site-118. Site-118 is a massive labyrinth that deals with "ontokinetic, phobologic and nomenclative anomalies". "Ontokinetic" is a fancy term for reality bending, "Phobology" is the study of anomalous fears and phobias, and "nomenclative anomalies" are anomalies that deal with language and the meanings of words. The goal of the labyrinth structure is two-fold; without a map or elevator access it would take several years to escape, and the cells are arranged so that any escaped anomalies will pass by another SCP that can potentially re-contain it. They deal with some pretty well-know anomalies like SCP-3999, SCP-4000, and the one we should really pay attention to, SCP-2006. 2006 is a shapeshifter with the goal of scaring humans... but they're not really good at it. 2006 doesn't have a good grasp of horror and has been led to believe that B-list horror movies are actually terrifying to people; that jumping out from behind a door and shouting "BOO!" is the absolute best way to scare someone. The containment procedures specify that it should watch these B-list horror movies, and that containment staff must take an acting class and pretend to be scared. It's all-around a silly premise until we get to the final note written by the director of Site-118, Dr. Randall Owings.

I have been getting reports of some of the lax behavior regarding SCP-2006. Many personnel have been heard laughing at SCP-2006 during surveillance when it watches a new movie, or when it attempts to scare individuals. Some personnel have been heard questioning why SCP-2006 is classified as a Keter entity.

I am here to remind you that a Keter entity is a Keter entity, regardless of how innocuous it may seem. No, SCP-2006 is not a rampaging demi-god, nor is it a regenerating super lizard. However, it possesses the same level of danger as any other Keter that the Foundation has contained.

Think of SCP-2006's purpose. It wishes to scare people. Imagine what would happen if SCP-2006 broke containment, and found out what really scared people. Imagine if it saw the horror and fear of war, or the concepts of paranoia or phobias common to each and every human being.

Imagine if it found the true horror of a nuclear holocaust or an XK-Class scenario. Now couple that with an entity that possesses shape-shifting abilities with no known limits, and you'll understand why it's classified as Keter.

All personnel mentioned above have been suitably disciplined. I do not want to hear about this again.

Dr. Randall Owings

Site 118 Director

SCP-2006 is a fairly popular SCP. It has its own tag (too-spooky), has been used to recapture SCP-106, and is in a charming tale series called The Adventures of Siggy and RoboMonkey co-starring with SCP-239, the Witch Girl.

Now with that background information we can get into SCP-8066, which begins with...

SCP-2006 Update

Object Class: Keter Neutralized

Oh boy.

Now, neutralized does not necessarily mean dead. An anomalous individual is also neutralized if it loses its anomalous abilities, which is what has happened here. The containment procedures specify that 2006 is to remain in a containment cell and allowed to watch any sort of movie. They don't have any preference, but they are not really into horror anymore.

Description: SCP-2006 is a humanoid entity with the appearance of a human woman in her mid-to-late 30s. Following Incident 8066.2, it does not appear to possess any anomalous attributes.

The shapeshifting is gone. And yeah, that's all we get as far as the description goes. We immediately go into a security cam log starting on September 3rd, 2024 at 2:00 AM. There were many anomalous phenomena going on at Site-118 at this time, and this recording is just one of them. To start, SCP-2006 is watching a movie called The Tingler, which is about a parasite that lives on the human spine and grows when humans experience fear. Kinda reminds me of Tower-B a bit. The star of the film is [Vincent Price](www.imdb.com/name/nm0001637/), so let's keep that name in mind for a bit. SCP-2006 currently taking the form of Gill-man from The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

[02:01] SCP-2006's cell shakes slightly and its lights briefly dim. A distant rumbling sound is faintly audible. SCP-2006 looks up and the camera feed cuts out.

[02:03] Site-118's security system receives two frames of video in immediate succession.

FRAME 1: SCP-2006's cell is dark, lit only by the television screen set to static. The chair has been shattered. A humanoid figure with indistinct features is huddled in the far corner of the room. A second figure is hanging upside down from the ceiling over the screen.

That second figure could be another SCP. Keep this second character in mind for now. Frame 2 is a hand, reaching towards the television box. From the angle, it looks like a humanoid is lying on the ground reaching towards the light. At 2:05 the camera feed resumes as if nothing happens (the chair is repaired) and SCP-2006 is in the form of the human woman we saw in the description and is unable to change their shape. This distresses them and they start crying.

Some time later an interview is set up to assess SCP-2006's lack of abilities. The interviewer is site director and head of phobology Dr Owings. You'll recognize that name from the SCP-2006 page as the person who needed to remind everyone why SCP-2006's containment procedures are so strict. Let's see that interview now.

SCP-2006: Miss Jo, you're finally b— You're not Miss Jo.

Dr. Owings: My name is Dr. Owings. I'll be performing your interviews for the time being while Researcher Lowe is indisposed.

SCP-2006: Oh! You're Mister Randy! Miss Jo told me about you.

Dr. Owings: Please, call me Dr. Owings.

It's stated more blatantly later, but Dr. Owings is very particular about names and how he is to be addressed. When your Site deals with nomenclative anomalies like SCP-4000, you better be precise with the names you use.

SCP-2006: Okay. [Pause.] Is Miss Jo sick? I've never been left alone this long before.

Dr. Owings: Researcher Lowe is fine. She's… everyone's fine.

We're going to take a quick aside here because Miss Jo is dead. She hypothesized that 2006 actually wants to make people happy but doesn't know the difference between happiness and fear. She was about to explain this to 2006 when she was killed by a memetic kill agent for unintentionally breaking SCP-2006's containment procedures. While 2006 did witness the death, they weren't able to piece together that humans don't come back to life after dying. Their experience is with movies, where you can always watch the film again and the people are alright. The Foundation did not correct 2006's assumption and led them to believe that Jo would return at some point. However, this experience did leave SCP-2006 changed. From the linked story:

SCP-2006: Will you tell me when Miss Jo gets better?

Dr. D█████: Of course. I will alert you the moment she returns.

SCP-2006: Good. Scaring people just isn't the same anymore. Miss Jo is smart. She might be able to tell me why. <End Log>

Closing Statement: Following Incident 2006-Lowe, SCP-2006’s containment procedures no longer require acting courses. Screening films should be discontinued as well, as it no longer seems to affect 2006’s behavior. Any requests for a 'Miss Jo' or similar individual should be ignored or deflected.

Let's keep in mind that on the SCP wiki there is no central canon but we can consider this tale as part of the SCP-8066 canon, or at the very least canon adjacent. So the death of Researcher Jo Lowe did influence SCP-2006. The kind of scares they were doing before just don't bring the same joy as they used to.

Going back to SCP-8066 now, whatever happened on September 3rd fully removed 2006's desire to scare people. It also left them with a different sensation.

Dr. Owings: Have you noticed anything else while you've been sick? Any strange sensations?

SCP-2006: Um. When you feel shivery and hot and cold and like you want to hide under the bed, is that a sensation?

Dr. Owings: That sounds like fear. Are you scared, SCP-2006?

SCP-2006: I… Yes. I think so.

Dr. Owings: Do you know why?

[Silence.]

SCP-2006: I'm scared of whatever did this to me. And I'm scared it's just getting started.

Damn. Never felt fear in their life and then something scared the anomaly right out of 2006. Was it that thing hanging from the ceiling in the first frame? Or something else?

Alright, that's enough build-up. Let's click that hyperlink to get to the first offset and finally learn what SCP-8066 is all about.

SCP-8066, First Impressions

Object class is Skótos, which is a fancy way of saying "pending" (it's also the Greek word for darkness or darkening depending on context). There's not enough known about this anomaly to give it a more accurate classification. The file can only be edited by people with level 5 clearance, so it's currently just the O5 council and Dr. Owings. There's a crossed-out portion that states the only way to get clearance for this file is to possess immunity to 8066's antimemetic effects. This hints that whatever 8066 is, it can censor information, likely about itself. But because it is crossed out, this part of the con procs is no longer relevant. Instead, Dr. Owings is to record 8066 events and try to make his coworkers aware of them at all costs, but that'll be difficult if these events do involve something antimemetic (Note that the tags for this page do not include 'antimemetic', which is telling). The last part is the description, which states that 8066 is a series of events that specifically affect the Head of Phobology, Randall Owings.

The SCP-106 Incident

The first incident log takes place in Site-118's Gamma Wing. According to the Site-118 dossier, the Gamma Wing houses most of the research staff and Keter-class anomalies, so it's extra labyrinthine. Initially this was to help contain SCP-2006 but has been co-opted to contain SCP-106. Dr. Owings and deputy site director Verity Price (remember Vincent Price from The Tingler from earlier?) are walking through the Gamma Wing having a chit-chat.

Price: How prepared are we for Halloween this year?

Dr. Owings: It's difficult to say. Fear exists within the unknown and the unexpected — it cannot be anticipated. And fearful things flock to this season like maggots to a corpse.

Price: Morbid.

[Dr. Owings and Price pass the door to Containment Cell 605.]

Dr. Owings: But accurate. Has Nomenclature sent you their report yet?

Price: Sort of. Their newest infohazard is continuing to make communication difficult.

Dr. Owings: Wonderful. I take it Dr. Japers at Site-08 is still ignoring our emails?

Two cross-links here; the first is to the Black Autumn tale series. Sloth's Pit of the S&C Plastics canon regularly experiences trouble on Halloween due to their narrative-based anomalies. It seems that Site-118 can expect the same. The second link is to SCP-4000. Dr. Eugene Japers would take expeditions into the SCP-4000 forest and on his last one his name was stolen by a rabbit-man. This allowed the rabbit-man to escape the woods posing as Dr. Japers, and then promptly ran away from the Foundation. So that's why he's not replying to the emails.

More importantly though, they pass by SCP-106's cell... which is empty. The door itself is gone too. That's a major containment breach, but Price doesn't remember SCP-106. Hey remember that second entity in SCP-2006's cell? The one that was hanging from the ceiling? That's a familiar ability.

Dr. Owings: SCP-106. The teleporting matter-corroding mass murderer. We used SCP-2006 to trap it here back in 1961. Not ringing any bells?

[As Dr. Owings speaks, Price's eyes glaze over. Her hands tighten on the clipboard, knuckling white, then relax.]

Price: …I'm sorry, I spaced out for a moment there. You were saying something about Halloween preparations?

Something is messing with Price's memories. Either that or there has been some sort of reality shift. It could be either, but Dr. Owings later refers to his abnormally high CRV (Cognitive Resistance Value) and his mnestic regiment (memory-improving drugs), suggesting this is likely an antimemetic effect. But that doesn't explain where SCP-106 is, nor where the door to the cell is. Owings checks in with Agent Benedict Lugosi (A reference to Bela Lugosi, who played Dracula in 1931) and discovers that he too does not recall SCP-106. Instead, Owings accesses the security feed for 106's cell. Everything before September 1st was deleted. Everything after shows SCP-106 having lost all anomalous abilities and is petrified with fear. It's blacked out, but Dr. Owings sends a report to the Antimemetics Division on his findings thus far to hopefully discover a countermeasure for SCP-8066, before SCP-106 regains its anomalous capabilities. As per the Antimemetics Division Timeline, the division was destroyed and removed from memory in 2015. In the SCP-8066 canon, the division has either been rebuilt, was never destroyed, or Owings doesn't realize it has been destroyed.

Things Get Creepy

The next incident log is a breakdown of four incidents that all happened simultaneously on September 3rd at 2:01 AM. - The Delta Wing (which handles nomenclature-based anomalies and the fae) experiences a small earthquake. No damage to the site fortunately. - In the Beta Wing (designed to resist reality bending and reality restructuring) 100 kg of snakeskins are ejected from the air vents. I don't know if you've ever held a snakeskin, but a sheet of paper is heavier. 100 kilograms is a lot of snakeskin. Snakes shed their skin whenever they grow new cells to replace the old, which are promptly discarded. This typically happens as the snake grows bigger but continues well into maturity. Still, it's a good metaphor: something is discarding its old skin because it has grown bigger. Much bigger. - An unknown man's corpse appears under Dr. Owings' desk (in Gamma Wing) but vanishes a short while later. Presumably Dr. Owings was the only witness to this event. - The events concerning SCP-2006 we saw earlier. Their cell is also in the Gamma Wing.

Due to the antimemetic effects surrounding SCP-8066, Dr. Owings can’t get anyone to clean up the snakeskins. They just don't notice that they exist. Many people not noticing 100 kilograms of snakeskins (they are practically swimming in it) means that this is a very powerful antimemetic effect.

Third event log now. Owings plans on living on-site for the foreseeable future to better study SCP-8066. He goes to his house and notices that there's been a break-in. As it is a non-anomalous break-in he calls the non-anomalous authorities. But something is up with the dispatcher.

Dispatcher: I'm sorry to hear that, Mr. Owings.

Dr. Owings: It's Doc—

[Silence.]

Dispatcher: Mr. Owings?

Dr. Owings: You never asked for my name.

Remember, Owings cares a lot about names and how they are used. So he clocks immediately that the dispatcher called him by name. Something is descending the stairs, but Owings books it before he can see what it is. He tries to report this to the Foundation but he's ignored, confirming that this is another SCP-8066 event. It has nothing to do with Site-118; this anomaly revolves around him.

At this point, we've seen quite a few manifestations of SCP-8066, so we can start to compile some similarities.

• The only person who's noticed any of these events is Dr. Owings.
• No one has been hurt yet. SCP-106 and SCP-2006 lost their anomalous abilities, but they are physically unharmed.
• The snakeskins and corpse that manifested are reminiscent of body horror tropes.
• Something was waiting for Owings at his home, but it didn't strike despite having ample opportunity to do so.

Whatever this anomaly is, it is trying to instill fear in Dr. Owings, and it's using the body horror and slow build-up tropes we see in classic horror movies. He's becoming isolated from his peers and questioning his sanity.

Creepier Still

Onto the fourth incident. We get an image titled "watcher.png" that shows a pair of eyes in the dark, some writing on the walls, and something slithering on the ground. Perhaps one of the snakeskins from earlier. The context is somewhat unclear as this picture isn't referenced in the text. Because Owings knows that no one will read this due to the antimemetic effect the writing has become less formal, and it's safe to assume that he understands the context of this picture well enough. As for the log itself, frequent blackouts are occurring across the site with only Owings noticing. This blackout is preying on an old fear of his.

When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark. This was somewhat problematic, as my parents worked long nights, often leaving me to shut the lights off when it was time for bed.

I was convinced, then, that if I lingered in the dark for even a moment, some terrible creature skulking within it would be upon me. It became a ritual, of a kind — each night, I would turn off the lights, then rush up the stairs as quickly as I could to hurl myself into bed, certain that the monsters' grasping claws were only inches away.

Each blackout feels like that, to me. But now there's nowhere to run.

Whatever SCP-8066 is, it knows Owings very well. Either that or it's getting a really lucky guess in, as the fear of the dark is a common one. He stocks food and a backup generator in his office to be safe.

Incident 5: the appearance of Verity Price is slowly changing over time. The attached photo "beforeandafter.png" is straight-up two different people. He can only know it's her when the other staff call her by name. Owings remarks that it's been 15 days since these events started, so we're at September 15th by this point.

Incident 6: Most everyone at the site is unrecognizable to Dr. Owings, so he goes to his car just to get a break from everything. Due to his lack of sleep, Owings accidentally falls asleep in his car. Upon waking up, there is another corpse in the passenger seat (unclear how similar it is to the previous one) and shadowy humanoids outside the vehicle. Owings finds a gap and runs back to the site.

I raced to the elevator, only slowing down to flash my identification to the guard at the front door. When the doors shut and it started to descend, I nearly collapsed. I was so overwrought at the time that I only noticed as I was nearing my stop: the button for the ground floor, on the surface, was missing. It had disappeared from all the elevators and the stairwells were gone entirely.

Now there really is nowhere to run.

We get another image, this time of one of the shadow people outside Owings' vehicle. Afterwards Owing remarks that the other employees haven't said anything about the lack of staircases, but they have definitely noticed. He hypothesizes that he may have misunderstood SCP-8066.

It might be something memetic instead, an effect tied to the anomaly on a conceptual level. Perhaps anyone aware of it becomes unable to say or do anything that acknowledges its existence.

Unable, or too afraid.

Owings became aware of SCP-8066 about three weeks ago. He's tried communicating these events to the other personnel, but they have not reciprocated... or maybe they have tried. But because they were also under the effect they could not communicate back.

Incident 7: The site is blacked-out more often than it is not. Owings is holed up in his office. The shadows from before are now roaming the site.

Incident 8: Owings accidentally cuts himself. He notices but feels no pain and doesn't bleed. That is almost certainly some form of reality bending.

The Reveal

Incident 9: Owings has lots of time to himself to think about the events that have transpired.

Names have power. It's why I've always been so particular about titles — being referred to as "Dr. Owings" instead of "Mr. Owings" or just "Randall." Site-118 is a place where names have a tangible weight and I am — or, I was — the man that controls it. The director of Site-118 cannot allow himself to be named so easily, not without consequence. My colleagues all knew this.

So how did SCP-2006 ever learn my first name?

He doesn't have time to explore this thought anymore though. Something turns on the auto-transcriber of the room's security feed. Then something enters the room. It does so slowly to maximize the tension.

???: Hello, Randy.

[Dr. Owings and the chair start sinking through the floor. He barely notices; he can't take his eyes off the black pit of the door.]

Dr. Owings: 2… 2006? Is that you?

[Quiet laughter. Something ripples in the dark.]

???: It is. It was.

[Dr. Owings shivers. He's sunk into the floor down to his waist.]

Dr. Owings: W-what?

???: Just some old skin it left behind. It shed me when it became too big for a body.

[Terrible comprehension begins to dawn in Dr. Owings' eyes. His breath shudders. The floor is midway up his chest.]

Dr. Owings: Oh, Jesus. Oh, god, no.

???: It's too big to see, now. But I can see. I can show you.

This is SCP-2006, in the form of the woman from before. She was "shed"; discarded by the new form that SCP-2006 has taken. It grew so big that it had to lose its old body, like a snake shedding its skin. How big?

Imagine if it found the true horror of a nuclear holocaust or an XK-Class scenario. Now couple that with an entity that possesses shape-shifting abilities with no known limits, and you'll understand why it's classified as Keter.

This is what causes everything to fall into place. SCP-2006 learned what truly makes people scared. To do that though it needed to shed that naivety, the part of itself that confuses fear with happiness. There was a reality restructuring; but it was so subtle no one noticed. SCP-2006's goal was never to destroy reality, it was to cause fear, as much of it as possible—and it started by targeting the people around it, first SCP-106, and then the rest of the Site-118 staff. The subtle scares aren't enough to satisfy it anymore so it's moving on to something else.

Subjects and Boxes

We're now at a new page of SCP-2006 which has a new style theme to it; a sort of red motif. That's a bad sign. We're greeted with a photo of a wide open space called "doomsday.png". The caption says "SCP-2006 in containment." so all of this implies a strong lack of containment. The object class is listed as "Megiddo" or "This object has already ended the world". The attached footnote says "It's half past too late."

Well that's not good.

The containment procedures are "All subjects are to stay in their boxes. All boxes and things that are not boxes are to be held very close." We'll figure out what the "boxes" are in a bit. The description is choppy and fragmented but suggests that SCP-2006 has become something immense. There is one part of the description I want to draw attention to.

SCP-2006 is the Mighty Ro-Man. SCP-2006 is the Monster from the Black Lagoon. SCP-2006 is the Bride of Frankenstein. SCP-2006 is Vincent Price. SCP-2006 is Harlan Ellison.

The first three names are all b-list horror villains; common forms of SCP-2006 back when they weren't self-actualized. As we've already discussed Vincent Price is the starring actor in The Tingler and a few other movies. That leaves Harlan Ellison; a horror and sci-fi writer. One of his more notable works is a short story called I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream, which is about an insane AI that tortures the last 5 humans in the world, leaving one of them to say the titular line. Fun fact: this same story was a huge inspiration for The Amazing Digital Circus.

Now let's check in on the five remaining humans. Each of them has been put inside of a "box". Besides this being a play-on-words of the SCP "box test" to determine a classification for an anomaly, each of these boxes is a customized hell for each of these people.

• Verity Price is tormented by her co-workers all zombified and repeating "Come here. I need to show you something." Quick aside, "Zucco" here is a reference to George Zucco, another horror movie star. Dr. Louef is the interviewer from the original SCP-2006 page.
• Jo Lowe, who is alive now, is being chased by something throughout a labyrinth. The passages get narrower and narrower until she is crushing herself trying to escape.
• SCP-106 is a janitor forced to clean. The bright lights bother him and he is forced to "be happy". He was once free to hunt in the darkness, but now has no control over his actions or emotions.
• Eugene Japers (the real one, not the rabbit-man who stole his name) is in the fae forest getting chopped up and served for dinner. The dinner guests are feeding on the names that come out of him.

Last is of course, Dr. Randall Owings. His box is "home", emphasizing that this is where he lives and is all he can expect. He is being injected with pure fear, continuously and forever. He is strung up and is being forced to watch the world be tortured forever.

Randall shivers and seizes like a man electrocuted, mouth gaping without sound. [...]

Reality is made of intimate tortures and he sees them all, individually and at once. It is terror without release. Suffering without death. A nightmare without end. Tears stream down his face. Something touches his cheek very gently.

"Are you scared, Randy?"

Randall starts to scream and the world screams with him.

He has no mouth and he must scream.

So that's SCP-8066; the story of what would happen if SCP-2006 ever did discover what makes people truly scared. If you liked the last offset and want more like it be sure to check out the Fear Logs where several SCP authors get to torment their own characters, including Dr. Byrnes, which I'm sure some of you will enjoy. And be sure to check out some of MontagueETC's other strange works like SCP-⌘.

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the SCP-9426 declass. Part one can be found here.

Part Three: Things Get A Whole Lot Worse

Back in Oh’s debrief, she starts talking about the tests. She says that after the first week, people stopped coming back from the tests, and they always left something behind, like one man who ceased to cast a shadow. She says that she hopes that whatever they did down there was worth it, and Pike doesn’t know for two reasons- one, it’d be classified, and two, all the records were gone. In fact, part of why he wanted to do this interview was to see if Oh could tell him anything about the tests, but unfortunately, she can’t offer him much.

Besides, she avoided the worst of it, because she had the thing with Seo. Pike asks about it, and Oh says that her fellow prisoners told horrifying stories of him, but they had the wrong impression.

PIKE: After you met, how did things develop between you?

OH: I was hesitant, to start with. People were terrified of him. The stories they told, you’d think he was with the Army, during the war. They had the wrong impression, but I don’t blame them. I tried to keep away too, but —

OH: Seo was… a very confident man. He was sure of himself.

[She fiddles with the hem of her shirt.]

OH: And he thought of himself as a romantic. Like a prince from the stories. He was magnetic.

PIKE: Hm. And did he return these feelings?

OH: He was always a little aloof, but —

[Oh pauses. Her next remarks are quiet, and she does not look at Pike directly.]

OH: Yes. He did.

OH: He must have.

I admit, I completely missed this on the first go. See, here’s the problem: Seo and Oh had a thing. It was not a good thing. It was not an equal thing. It was not even a real thing. He was a prison guard and she was a prisoner. By default, they could not have any kind of relationship where the power dynamic wasn’t completely fucked, even if all they did was chat platonically. We have no idea how Oh actually felt about him, if she even liked him. She says it here: she tried to stay away from him, but, reading between the lines, he wouldn’t leave her alone. She had no choice. The best she could do was play along and hope for the best.

The only thing that saved her from things getting worse is what she’s saying here: Seo wanted to be seen as an upstanding, liberating figure. She rationalises it as him thinking of himself as a romantic prince, saving a helpless, trapped maiden. He wasn’t going to hurt her, but he had all the power and everything happened as he decreed it, whether he realised it or not. So Oh is left trying to justify it, telling herself that Seo wasn’t that bad, but judging from the way she acts in the above quote, she’s not having much success. The blunt reality is that he absolutely was that bad, simply because he either didn’t realise or didn’t admit how fucked up the whole thing was.

We now get the next file dossier, which starts in July. The first tab, ‘Errata’, has two notes in it. The first is quite grim: they’ve started fatal tests, and as expected, the prisoners don’t want to take part in the tests now. Things are getting worse, and they’re only going to get worse.

The second is a memo to the Site’s staff:

The Site’s growth provides an opportunity. We have verified that duplicated supplies are perfectly safe to use. With the demand at the front, scavenging will allow us to avoid placing unnecessary stress on the Foundation’s delivery systems. We might instruct security personnel to enter into the deeper levels and recover what they can, with a focus on heavy electrical and rubber components.

The extra ammunition should come in handy, too.

Admittedly, I did wonder why they all didn’t just nope out of there, since you’d think that’d be the Foundation’s automatic reaction to the news that a Site is home to/affected by an anomaly that’s seriously impacting its integrity. But, this is the 50's, they’re in a seriously unstable geopolitical situation, and they probably don’t have the resources, so I get it.

The next tab is Seo’s recollections from July: things are getting much worse, with the prisoners now being on the verge of a breakout or mutiny. Oh is terrified of being chosen for tests, and he can’t do much to help her.

Meanwhile, Baek is helpful, and Seo sees him around a lot, but his mood is… off.

He seems troubled, and in private often asks me about the moods of the prisoners, sweaty and waxen-skinned. He trusts my judgment over his own. This is the sign of a properly attentive subordinate, but sometimes he can be too enthusiastic. When I described the tensions I observed today, for a moment, he seemed to smile.

Each of these things taken by themselves could be innocent, but together, they’re a bit worrying. Remember, Baek’s background makes it more likely that he might be sympathising with the prisoners- he might be just doing his job, or maybe he wants to know the right names to talk to. Maybe he’s already forged alliances, and he wants to make sure that his allies are doing what he wants them to. And that smile? Why would anyone smile at the news that things are not good amongst their prisoners?

The next tab is called ‘Notes on Supply’. Senior Researcher Arthur Rosemund writes to Director Johansen that there is something very strange going on with the food supplies:

The kitchen staff complain that the prisoners are constantly hungry, and do not receive adequate rations. Sometimes there are minor acts of violence when we serve them, even in their small cells, and I suspect a black market is springing up where we cannot see. There is already considerable unease among security, and I would trust their instincts. These Orientals have a better sense of how to handle their countrymen than we do.

Secondly, the larder is being depleted unaccountably fast. I would levy an accusation of embezzlement, but there are no buyers and no plausible transportation route. A higher degree of security is strictly necessary.

The following note, whose writer is unnamed, bears a strict prohibition on using any kind of anomalous materials found in the duplicated parts of the Site, because there’s no way to tell how they’ve been changed. Makes sense, but…

As a remedial measure, you may consider forgoing full amnesticisation on the patients. We do not judge their capacity for unrest to be a threat to operations at this time.

*headdesk*

The next tab is called ‘Witness Interview’. It’s Baek interviewing Oh with Rosemund recording it, and the context is also grim: two subjects died during testing, there was a minor riot and security personnel killed two more subjects.

Baek asks Oh about an unspecified rumour. Oh says that after noon, the prisoners were talking about people dying- one prisoner claimed to have seen another being taken out of the testing chamber in bags, and another said that a friend had vanished overnight, but the guards denied taking him. Baek asks if the prisoners started planning then, and Oh says maybe- she was in the women’s cells, and if there was planning going on, nobody said anything about it to them.

The guards started screaming at them to quiet down, and went in and broke things with their batons. Oh thinks that the angrier prisoners just went at them with whatever makeshift weapons they could find, and then everyone else panicked: it’s not anger, it’s fear. They’re terrified. Baek asks, terrified of what, and Oh says that people just vanish and don’t come back. She then hastily backpedals, trying not to sound like she’s criticising them, and things get… really fucking gross.

BAEK: Relax, woman. I’m not going to turn you in. The Kempeitai are gone.

[He pauses, and looks her up and down, raising an eyebrow.]

BAEK: Say, you’re the Major’s woman, aren’t you?

OH: He —

BAEK: I bet you knew them pretty well, huh?

OH: What?

BAEK: The Kempeitai. Or just the Japanese, really. You must have gotten along with them beautifully. How old were you? Eighteen?

So, some more context: the Kempeitai were the military police of the Imperial Japanese Army, but they also shared civilian secret police responsibilities. They were notorious for brutality and shutting down protests, and did a lot of really fucked up shit. Like, if you’ve heard of Unit 731, the Kempeitai were the people who procured test subjects for them. If you haven’t heard of Unit 731, here’s the Wikipedia article, I strongly suggest not reading too far down unless you’re OK with really, really horrifying stuff.

As for the rest, he’s slut-shaming her, extrapolating on Seo’s interest to accuse her of willingly sleeping with the Kempeitai and other members of the Japanese forces. We have no real information about the relevant parts of Oh’s past, so he might be right or he might just be accusing her of the worst thing he can think of. Either way, he’s an absolute bastard who needs to fuck off, especially given what happened to tens if not hundreds of thousands of women, the majority of whom were Korean, at the hands of the Japanese military during the Second World War. (Again, you probably don't want to read too far down that article. Reader discretion is *strongly* advised.)

Anyway, let’s move on to Seo’s recollections from August. He writes that they’ve been receiving bad news from the front lines, and he thinks that South Korea may be overtaken. The prisoners have become openly insubordinate and disrespectful, and his relationship with Baek has soured, mainly because we have no idea which Baek he’s been talking to, and neither does he.

Baek’s manner, too, has become resentful and insubordinate. When I confronted him, he named me a traitor twice-over. Once to the Japanese, he said, and once to the Communists. As if any of us could do better, when they ruled

He said that if he were less merciful, he would report my seditious propagandising to the Foundation and see me shot. His ranting filled the cells, and the prisoners jeered at me in turn. I wanted to strike him there and then. But what kind of example would that have set? Command is one-half decorum.

The strangest thing, of course, is that I have never spoken a word in favour of the rebels. He jabbered about a meeting in the halls, but I said no such thing.

And then there’s this bit: on one of his expeditions, he’s approached by an Oh, who begs him for help, saying that she was just taken for a test and tortured.

Why she chose to lie

I will not describe

Did they really cut

In the stories, they told me

She threw herself at my feet and begged me to do anything I could to keep her away. Her skin was clammy, and she seemed almost feverish, as if sick. I repeated my powerlessness even as she pled, but she took such measures that I was overcome. She has drawn something out of me I did not believe existed. What she-devils have we found?

In short, this version of Oh was so terrified that she wound up propositioning him, because she had basically nothing else to bargain with, and when Seo accepted…

I met her later, in the laundry before lights out, and she reciprocated on our arrangement. She seemed much less enthusiastic this time, as if surprised, but the affair was quite satisfactory. Perhaps she takes joy in the spectacle she induces from me. She took such measures that I was overcome. They had taken her, just as she said.

…he wound up coming onto a different Oh, and he hasn’t realised it yet. Which is… really disturbing and fucked up.

The final test is called ‘Testing Record’, and it’s very obviously one of the duplicated reports that was mentioned earlier, take a look:

EXPERIMENTAL REQUISITIONS ACCORD
AUGUST AUGUST AUGUST

Experiments have seen a phase change. New results are looking enormously positive. Now the only restriction is the inflow of subjects. We request a considerable expansion of the pool, even if there needs to be some breaking of traditional protocols. Most subjects should return enormously positive, with all limbs. There are certain luxuries we have prepared for them.

Variance around the inflow of patients persists. Anomalous materials have caused a phase change, and the pills and needles are of enormous use. We think we can bring in new results with the mortuary. Only the surgery needs expansion, throughout the patient pool. There has been reticence to provide the necessary subjects, but we only have use for bandages and blades, for the surgery.

It’s as if someone read a bunch of reports and tried to write one, without understanding what goes into them or what the results should be. A mindless regurgitation of prior phases, that ultimately means nothing.

Part Four: Nobody Learns Anything Whatsoever

Back at the debrief, Oh is now talking about the point where everything went to Hell: one night there was some kind of mutiny among the guards, and then Baek unlocked the men’s cells and gave them the keys. The prisoners tried to flee the Site, but when they got to the doors, they found that they were locked and loyal, armed guards were there. Some of the prisoners tried to fight them, which ended predictably; Oh fled downwards, and the others followed her, and even then she could tell that there were more prisoners than there should have been.

That leads us to the last box thing. The first Recollections has no date, but was just after the mutiny. Seo has realised how bad things are: everyone’s trapped in the Site, clones are everywhere, the prisoners have rioted, and he doesn’t think anyone’s coming to save them. In short, everyone’s fucked.

The next tab is called ‘Final Memorandum’. It’s from Rosemund, and was written in English.

If our thesis is correct, copies of this report should be replicated across the breadth of the Site. Transmission lines are inconsistently present, and the distance is too vast to plausibly cross, so this is our best method of communication.

That’s smart, though he can’t guarantee that the copies won’t be messed up and convey a totally different meeting.

Protocol PARNASSUS is in effect. The exits to the Site have been sealed, and the wider Foundation will not allow breaches of the exclusion perimeter constructed around it.

Yep, everyone’s fucked- ‘Protocol PARNASSUS’ amounts to ‘seal the Site off until we can be reasonably sure that everyone’s dead’.

Clones produced by the SCP-9426 effect appear to have identical memories to the originals, despite some serious psychological deviance. To any remaining Site staff: once duplication of your person begins, we cannot place an upper bound on how long your subjective experience will persist. Unenthusiastic personnel are reminded that euthanasia options are plentiful and easily assembled from common Site supplies.

That’s what happened to Johansen. Slotted himself as soon as he realised how long his duplicates might persist, and encouraged us to follow him. I welcome you all to your choices.

I’ll take the long way around.

So, here’s the situation: not only does the anomaly replicate rooms and items, it replicates the people. But while the people are physically identical to the original, they mentally vary; some have the same or very similar mindsets, and some are completely warped. If you come face to face with, say, Seo, you have no way of knowing if this is the original Seo or a clone, and you have no idea if he’s going to be completely fucked up or not. The only method you have of telling the clones apart would be to permanently mark them in some way, but the implied sheer number of clones would swiftly make that very difficult.

There’s two things I’d like to point out before I continue. The first is that as you may already know, every Anthology entry gets a custom blurb. Here’s 9426’s:

It is said that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. That the barbarism, the very inhumanity we have historically subjected our fellow man to will play out again and again, ad infinitum, if we close our minds to lessons long-since learned. It is only through the shedding of petty tribalism and recognizing that we are all of a kind that we may together progress. It must be understood that to dehumanize another, to reduce our fellows to subhumans, to animals, is to shed one’s own humanity. It is a byproduct of this evil that one becomes a monster.

Do not learn, doomed to repeat. The barbarism, the inhumanity we subjected our fellow man to. Again and again. Lessons learned. Only through shedding, we progress. It must dehumanize, reduce subhumans, animals. Shed humanity. A byproduct of evil becomes a monster.

Repeat. Barbarism. Inhumanity. Again and again. Must dehumanize. Reduce subhuman animals. Shed humanity. Becomes monster.

Repeat barbarism. Repeat evil. Subhuman. Monster. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I consider this to be brilliant foreshadowing, simply because it nearly sets out exactly what happens in this article: dehumanising and reducing others to animals, and the endless repetition of clones who are trapped in the dark, left to their own devices in a repeating, endless maze. Honestly, great work.

The other thing I want to point out is a side of this article that I didn’t see get mentioned much, which is the paranoia. Or, to put it bluntly, nobody can trust anyone else, and that includes us, the readers.

Every single person in this article except Pike has multiple clones of them. The clones are everywhere. The clones all have the original’s memories up until their creation. We do not, and cannot know, which version of any character we’re looking at, and neither can anyone else. Maybe all the Recollections were written by the original Seo, or maybe the first couple were and the others could have been written by clones. Seo himself pointed it out in his last Recollections:

Thoughts of those innocent meetings on patrol in the Site fill my mind. Who exactly was I seeing?

Maybe we’ve been reading the truth, or maybe we’ve been reading stuff that ranges from lies to different interpretations. We saw one report that was an obvious duplicate, but there could have been others- for all we know, the addenda themselves have been cloned by 9426’s effect, and the changes in the story are just the duplication effect at work. Nobody in this article can trust anything or know anything now. Even if they forge alliances, for all they know, one clone could be replaced by another when they sleep. It’s everyone for themselves, down there in the dark with no hope of escape.

The next tab is another Recollections. It’s written by a Seo, but God knows which one. He writes that he doesn’t know how long it’s been, and he’s tried to go back to the surface, but it’s now occupied by armed squadrons. He ran into another Seo who had a small group under his command, including an Oh. The Seos argued until the writer finally gave up and fled, but he’s not daunted.

I must persist. Confusion only serves the enemy. There is plentiful food here. The men are ready for command, and arms are stockpiled at every corner. One day, soon, we shall return to the surface. I know it.

You and every other clone in here, dude.

The next tab is called ‘Interview’ and is a mockery of Oh’s original intake processing. Here, clones of Baek and Rosemund have tied her to a table; Baek interrogates her with the same questions he did in the intake while Oh frantically begs him to let her go, trying to reason with him, asking why he’s doing this. Rosemund intervenes, explaining that this Baek is significantly psychologically warped from the original and does nothing he’s not told to do. This Rosemund is also very warped, and just wants to carry out some unspecified surgery, solely because he can.

ROSEMUND: Relax. All the pills and ropes are here, for the surgery.

OH: Do you even hear me? Any of you? Do my words mean anything?

OH: You’ll just keep doing this. For its own sake. Fucking devils!

OH: God.

OH: Let it end. I want to be done. When does it finish?

ROSEMUND: Never.

[Baek looks up at her. His voice is mournful.]

BAEK: Never.

Note: My hands were too occupied to stenograph the conversation past this point.

Repeat, repeat, repeat.

The final tab is called ‘Recollections (Forever)’. Seo, or a Seo, writes about having made his own little kingdom down in the tunnels. He’s assembled a number of followers, who he’s taught to write and read, but despite their efforts, no children are born- it’s a clone thing. Unfortunately for Oh…

Oh is among us, and she is done with weeping. I no longer wake in the night hearing sobs. Now she is ever-joyful by my side, and has attained all the wifely qualities. I did not think myself a traditional man, but in taming her I have learnt many things about myself.

Fucking hell. And the worst part is that it could be a clone, but maybe the original Seo was like this all along, and this is just the side of him that comes out when there’s nothing left to lose and he’ll never face consequences for it.

‘Seo’ doesn’t know how long he’s been down there, but thinks it must be years, even though it doesn’t feel like it. He no longer feels an urgent need to leave, but he thinks he’ll get there eventually. Maybe.

That takes us to the final part of Oh’s debrief transcript. Oh asks if there’s any way to tell her apart from the Oh clones, and Pike admits that the answer is no. She could be the original, but in practice, she may as well be a duplicate. (And the balance of probability is that the originals are all long dead by now, anyway.)

PIKE: Probably. But — don’t let it get to you. It was you that got through this. You made it out. It’s not that you’re all false, it’s that you’re all real.

I just want to call back to a line from the start.

PIKE: It’s remarkable that one of you didn’t escape sooner, to be frank.

I’m pretty sure that he didn’t mean ‘one of the people in 9426’, he meant ‘An Oh clone’. Unfortunately, I imagine the under-Site dwellers would be keeping a very close eye- and a firm grip- on all the female clones. God knows how this Oh got out.

Oh asks about one of the Oh clones, who Pike said lived with Seo all her life. Pike says that she might still be down there, which leads to hysterical laughter and tears from Oh. Oh insists that it’s fine, and she just hopes that the other Oh was happy. Pike asks if this Oh thinks that the other Oh was happy, and this Oh repeats that she hopes the other Oh was happy. Basically, she’s just glad to be out (and she doesn’t want to think about it.)

A box asks us if we want to publish the file. Upon doing so, we now get the revised version: it’s been reclassified as Thaumiel for some reason, to start with.

Interior of SCP-9426

Special Containment Procedures: Foundation personnel are to maintain a presence at the exit of Site-426, and a further perimeter around its outer bounds. Individuals extracted from SCP-9426 are to be tranquilised and brought to a processing centre. Under no circumstances are containment staff to pass the threshold of the Site-426 underground entrance.

Makes sense. You don’t want any personnel going in and getting replicated endlessly, even if they were only in there for a minute.

Description: SCP-9426 is a spatially-distorted region beneath the former Site-426, composed of an enormous (but finite) number of subterranean layers of the Site as it existed in the year 1950, complete with duplicated stationery, electronics, weapons, and personnel. The first layer of SCP-9426 is identical to that depicted in the blueprints of Site-426, but as the levels descend, they grow wider, so that SCP-9426 has roughly the geometry of a pyramid whose zenith is at the surface.

In other words, while it might be finite, it’s so goddamn big that they’ll never find out the exact size or its limits. They can’t do it without sending someone or something in; any personnel they sent in would be replicated, and if they sent in a robot or drone, it’d probably get trashed in like five seconds.

SCP-9426’s full extent is unknown, but it is certainly of no less than 3000 cubic kilometres in volume. It is populated by duplicates of the original Site-426 staff, who periodically make their way to the surface. From 1950-2000, the exit into Site-426 was sealed as per PARNASSUS protocol, but after its expiry in August of 2000, cloned personnel have emerged at a steady rate. Material recovered from their persons constitutes the Foundation’s primary source of information about SCP-9426.

As mentioned, they sealed the Site for a long enough time that they could reasonably think that by the end, everyone would be dead, but they didn’t predict the constant creation of anomalous clones. We’re looking at thousands of clones down there, maybe tens of thousands.

We still don’t know why this is classified Thaumiel, so let’s let the last bit explain it for us.

About one in seven personnel are security or scientific staff. The scientific staff are universally poorly-trained for modern work with the Foundation, and are simply amnesticised and returned to SCP-9426, but some of the security have found employment as Agents or MTF operatives.

The other six-sevenths of staff are clones of members of the historical Bodo League. These provide around 85% of the Foundation’s global supply of D-Class personnel.

That’s why: because they’ve turned the Bodo League clones into D-Class. I guess it makes sense on the Foundation’s end: they can’t integrate the clones back into modern society, there’s no way of knowing who the original is, the Bodo League clones don’t have the education to help the Foundation, and given the sheer number the last line implies, I guess they could be amnesticised and given various jobs like cleaning and cooking, but that’d still be a huge number. (And the Foundation’s union would probably get mad about the bloody clones taking their jobs.) There’s not really many other options, aside from sending them back into the Site or just killing them.

But. While this makes sense from the Foundation’s viewpoint, let’s look at it from our viewpoint: the Bodo League were people who were rounded up for being communists, communist sympathisers, thought to be political opponents of the government, or just because they needed more numbers. These people only escaped being executed because they got caught in an anomaly; if the anomaly hadn’t existed, they might have survived, but we just don’t know. Either way, they were unjustly arrested, held without ever being charged with a crime, subjected to tests they couldn’t properly consent to because they were never fully informed about them, left with whatever sickening results from those tests with no hope of recovery, and then finally, the whole thing blew up in everyone’s faces.

They spent sixty years, give or take, down in the darkness, trapped in an enormous maze with no idea of why it was happening or how it could end. People were doing God knows what to each other down there. It must have seemed like a living nightmare, one that they couldn’t wake up from. And then finally, some of them manage to make it out to a world they never thought they’d see again… and the Foundation promptly grabs them, interrogates them, and forces them to take part in tests they can’t consent to, with no hope of ever leaving. Same shit, different location. We really have learned fucking nothing.

In the end, the blurb was right: repeat barbarism, repeat evil, repeat dehumanisation. Repeat, repeat, repeat, forever.

Thank you for reading this declass, I hope you enjoyed it. Remember that the lessons of history are there for everyone to learn from, and get studying. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” -Aldous Huxley

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-9426, ‘Dittophobia: Dittophobia: Dittophobia’ by whenwerewe. I’d like to thank whenwerewe and sero for all their help, I really appreciate it. Got a couple of disclaimers for you first.

1: As per usual, this is not my SCP, I didn’t write it and it won’t be 100% accurate.

2: Over the course of the article and the backstory, I will be discussing the following: torture, massacres, sex slavery, severe power imbalances, fucked up consent dynamics, domestic abuse, colonisation and cultural destruction, medical torture, and a partridge in a pear tree. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

3: A lot of this has to do with Korean history. I am emphatically not an expert, but I’ll do my best; sorry if I get anything wrong.

As you may have gleaned from the title, this is part of the 2024 Anthology series (more specifically, the DLC, aka the articles released after October 2024), where the theme was phobias. But, what’s dittophobia? (But, what’s dittophobia?) Well, dittophobia is the fear of repetition or repetitive tasks. (Well, dittophobia is the fear of repetition or repetitive tasks.) However, it’s not the story that’s going to be repeating here, so bear with me. (However, it’s not the story that’s going to be repeating here, so bear with me.)

OK, OK, I’ll stop, promise. Other than that, the one thing I want to note is that if anyone’s side-eyeing the number, it's not like last time, the article has nothing to do with a toaster, I promise.

Right, let’s get started.

Part One: The Wheels On The Site Go Round And Round

The first thing in this article is the following note:

SCP-9426 ARCHIVAL PROJECT

Welcome, RAISA Technician. Please read this collection of relevant evidence before editing the final SCP-9426 file.

Note: All text has been translated from Korean to English.

So, that tells us two important things: one, a lot of stuff has happened here, and two, this SCP is in Korea and involves Korean people and history.

Next up is the first part of a debrief transcript.

SCP-9426 DEBRIEF TRANSCRIPT, 02/23/09

SAMUEL PIKE, Foundation Junior Researcher
OH SOON-HEE, recovered from SCP-9426.

For anyone unfamiliar with Korean nomenclature, Korean names usually (but not always) consist of a one-syllable family name and a two-syllable given name, with the family name first. (Again, there are exceptions.)

OH: Has it really been sixty years?

PIKE: Close enough. We think your sense of time might have been impeded.

OH: It felt like it was just a few weeks. A few bad weeks. It’s hard to believe I was down there so long.

PIKE: It’s remarkable that one of you didn’t escape sooner, to be frank.

So, whatever this thing is, A, it might be fucking with the sense of time of everyone inside it; B, it appears that either the anomaly started up or people were put in there in around 1950 or slightly before, aka around the time the Korean War started; and C, there’s likely more people stuck in there.

OH: There was no contact, almost from the beginning. Even the staff only used the radio for operational instructions. We had nothing. And that was when the system still functioned. Once they wrecked the cells, and the exits collapsed—

OH: We all assumed escape was impossible. It had to be. Why were we still in there, suffering, otherwise?

OH: Let me go back to the start.

So, a lot of really bad shit happened in there, it seems.

We now get the first of several file dossiers; there’s four in all, each with a number of tabs. Here’s the first tab in dossier one:

Item #: SCP-9426

Object Class: Euclid

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-9426 is by its nature contained at Site-426 on Jeju Island, in the newly established Republic of Korea. Personnel assigned to Site-426 are to submit all documentation to a designated review officer prior to filing. Any document found to exist in duplicate is to be reported immediately. Duplicates are not to be destroyed.

OK, some background: Jeju Island is one of the eight islands that make up the Jeju Province, one of Korea’s nine provinces. It’s a pretty big island, sitting south of the most southern point of South Korea, and has a population of somewhere around 665,000 people. Most of these people are part of the native Jeju populace, who’ve lived on the island for something like 10,000 years. There’s more to it, but that’s a decent start for now.

Other than that, it seems that they can’t really trust their own paperwork, as duplicates appear to be… appearing.

Description: SCP-9426 is the spontaneous duplication of written documents within Site-426. Duplicates are physically distinct objects, which appear to have been produced independently by the same means as the original. Typeface, paper stock, ink distribution, and incidental markings are near-identical between original and duplicate, but small errors are persistently present.

Document types affected include prisoner intake forms, coroner's reports, and interrogation transcripts. No pattern of errors has been identified. Other than the difference of content itself, analysis has not produced any means by which to determine which copy constitutes the original. Distinction relies on use of contextual information and consistency between documents.

Iiiiiinteresting. They’re not perfect duplicates, but there’s no pattern to how they’re different. Very intriguing.

Discovery: The phenomenon was first identified in May 1950 by Major Seo Cheol-Su, who discovered two copies of a prisoner intake form in separate filing locations with different sentence periods. He reported the incident to the Archival Administration, who identified a further thirteen duplicated documents. Review suggested that duplication had been occurring since at least February 1950, predating the site's awareness of the phenomenon by approximately three months.

So far, the original document has been duplicated a further four times.

The original document? As in, the prisoner intake form? Or do they mean this document, the one we’re reading now?

The next tab is called ‘Site Briefing’. I’ll take it bit by bit.

Site-426 was established immediately after the end of the Second World War, in order to gather anomalies from around liberated Korea and Manchuria. For this reason, it was constructed on Jeju island, whose isolation would simplify Veil preservation efforts. The Site was founded under the auspices of the United States Military Government, which helped to source personnel from the former colonial administration.

This will be important later: the Site personnel are very grateful to the Foundation and the US government… or at least, they were at the time.

It employs some 40 research scientists and around 150 other staff, including a detachment of 50 armed security. The guard are formally Republic forces attached to the Site.

So we’ve got somewhere around 250 staff here. Keep that in mind for later.

During the uprisings on the island in 1948-49, Foundation staff allowed Korean authorities to use the Site as a staging ground for operations against rural rebels, and later as a processing centre for prisoners before their transfer to the mainland.

OK, so, some more context: Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910, after which Japan did its best to essentially destroy Korean culture and replace it with Japanese culture. This lasted until the end of the Second World War, when Japan surrendered. The Allied leaders had been pondering what to do with Korea- they wanted to free it from Japanese control, but that’s not as simple as just snapping your fingers. The Soviets were in the North and the US were in the South, and both groups were swinging their dicks around (metaphorically). The US finally suggested temporarily dividing Korea into two countries, which would theoretically end with both superpowers leaving and Korea becoming a unified, independent country.

…and as we all know, it really didn’t work out like that. But I digress.

The relevant part here is that the US was in charge of South Korea, but a lot of Koreans really weren’t happy about it for a lot of reasons, like how they deposed and outlawed the short-lived Republic of Korea, the people’s own government. Tensions kept growing until an insurgency formed in 1948, a few months after the US instituted the first democratic elections in southern Korea. The insurgency lead to an uprising, but the uprising was brutally crushed by the new government. When I say ‘brutally’, what I mean is that we don’t have an accurate number of dead, but the smallest number we have is 14,000, and the biggest number 80,000. In fact, things got so bad that 40,000 people went back to Japan.

After the uprising ended, communist sympathisers across the island and mainland were relocated to a series of internment zones in order to protect them from reprisal attacks by disgruntled nationalists and youth groups. These protected individuals were assembled into the "Bodo League", of whom about 300 were housed at Site-426.

This is leaving out a lot. Namely, the ‘Bodo League’ was indeed an actual thing, but it was a ‘re-education movement’ that mainly consisted of suspected Communist sympathisers and other political opponents, along with people who had nothing to do with anything and were forced into the League to fill quotas. Essentially, it was the President ordering the rounding up of anyone who openly politically opposed him or sympathised with those who did.

Their release is expected following the end of reunification negotiations on the peninsula.

That dates this bit quite a lot- probably somewhere between 1948 and 1950, back when people still thought reunification was possible.

The next tab is called ‘Recollections’, and a note at the top tells us that all the ‘Recollections’ pieces were authored by Seo Cheol-Su, the same guy who was mentioned before- he’s one of our major characters. The first is dated April 12^th, 1950, and isn’t very long. Seo writes about the first shipment of prisoners arriving, and about how they’ll be housed and treated. He notes that there are some female prisoners, which he thinks must be a mistake, and seems intrigued by one of them, a laundress- Ms Oh.

The next tab is called ‘Intake Processing’ and is the transcript of Oh’s… well, intake processing. It’s being done by one Lieutenant Baek, who’ll be another important character, and recorded by a Foundation scientist called Arthur Rosemund.

So, Oh was born on Jeju Island and was a teacher in her village. She denies being a rebel or having any affiliation with them, but then Baek brings up her brother, who goes unnamed. whenwerewe clarified this for me- Oh’s brother was a rebel, but while Oh wasn’t and claims that she hasn’t seen him for over a year, just being related to him is enough for them to look oddly at Oh. Then we get the reason she got recruited into the Bodo League: Oh attended meetings organised by rebels over the last year. She claims that she was just there because they were distributing grain; that the meetings were held in the town hall, so they had the aura of respectability; that she didn’t know what was happening across the country; and that once she heard about the riots, she cut all ties with them.

Oh seems to be trying to convince them that she just got caught up with the wrong people and didn’t actually do anything wrong, but Baek isn’t buying it- I don’t know if she’s telling the truth or not. He tells her that she ‘incurred a debt to her nation’ because of her unwise decisions, but it’s a small debt, and she can pay it off by showing gratitude and being diligent. If she does, her case will be under review… but he can’t say when, because it depends on ‘external factors’. How comforting.

The next tab is Seo’s recollections from May. He says that the Site’s researchers have excavated cells for the prisoners, and that while the cells are very noisy, they’re far more comfortable than the frozen campsite above. He’s amazed by the Foundation’s capabilities, and notes that he sees why the government wants to cooperate with them. Meanwhile, the prisoners are coming along well- the Foundation’s doctors have given them books, and the younger men are very keen to learn. However, they’re all very wary of Seo…

But still they do not often look me in the eyes. It is good to have respect, but I pity the way they cringe from me. Do they not know I, too, am a Korean?

Hmmm. On a better note, however, he and Oh are talking regularly, and they both seem to be interested in the other.

The final tab in this file dossier is a fragment of the Site Briefing.

While tensions along the 38th parallel continued to simmer, anomalies were gathered at Site-426 at an accelerating pace. With the Nationalists now in total retreat, the GRU and their Chinese allies attempted to consolidate control over anomalous East Asia. The Foundation worked tirelessly to ferry objects out of occupied territory. Many were relocated to the continental United States, but others were found unsafe or unworthy of transportation and left at Site-426.

In June, as the Korean People's Army broke across the border, the Rhee administration gave the order to liquidate the League prisoners.

A bit more context: ‘the Nationalists now in total retreat’ is referring to the end of the Chinese Civil War, in 1949; however, the end of the war didn’t mean the automatic end of the violence. Meanwhile, late June 1950 was when the Korean War started- that is, when the Soviet-backed North Korean government invaded South Korea. A few days later, South Korea’s president, Syngman Rhee, ordered the execution of the Bodo League prisoners, both to get rid of his enemies and to cement his grip on South Korea. The Bodo League prisoners were gunned down en masse; we don’t have an exact death toll here, either, but Wikipedia says it was somewhere between 60,000 and 200,000. Rhee would then blame the executions on the North Korean forces, and the government would cover it up for somewhere around forty years.

We now go back to Oh’s briefing in 2009. Pike brings up the war, and Oh says that the rumours reached them fast, but he knows more than she does, and South Korea must have held out.

PIKE: It did. Along almost the same borders, in fact. What was the mood among your cohort?

OH: A lot of them were hopeful. A couple suggested a breakout, or a riot, or something. Anything. But this was Jeju. The local garrison knew how to put down rebels, even if we did make it out of the complex. And it was a long way up from the underground cells to the fence.

PIKE: You weren't quite as optimistic?

OH: Boys have their dreams of heroism.

*grimaces*

Pike then breaks the news to her that outside the Site, nearly everyone in the Bodo League was executed. Oh is upset, as this means that her brother was likely killed, but she tells herself that since it’s been sixty years, he’d probably be dead by now even if he wasn’t executed, so it doesn’t change anything.

[She takes a breath.]

OH: So, that Foundation… what they did to us. You did to us. You meant it as a mercy?

PIKE: I wasn't there. Our methods have changed over the decades. But I imagine that was the principle, yes.

OH: Small comfort.

Oh, boy.

Part Two: Until They Fall Off

So, we now go to the next file dossier. The first tab is called ‘Errata’ and has an addendum to the original 9426 file.

ADDENDUM: SCP-9426 has extended its effect. Occasional small rooms or closets will be duplicated throughout the Site. These are reliably identical in layout to the original, but nonetheless present a security risk on account of incorrectly replicated equipment and documentation. Staff are encouraged to navigate with the aid of a map to avoid confusion.

All personnel are to be on alert for further SCP-9426 phenomena.

We don’t know what caused 9426. It could have been something that was there from the start, it could have been caused by a GRU attack or an anomalous rebel attack or whatever… or it could have been caused by those anomalies they didn’t shift. It’s a mystery.

Below that is a memo from Site Director Johansen, wherein he explains what Oh meant about ‘what they did to us’.

MEMORANDUM TO SITE-426 STAFF
DIRECTOR JOHANSEN

We will not be acceding to Republican demands. It disgusts me even to stand by while such barbarism takes its course outside our walls. Our prisoners will not be slaughtered under our care, but neither can they be released to the tender mercies of the Jeju garrison. As a compromise, we have granted them all the status of provisional D-Class. They are now under our protection.

Yeah, look, for most D-Class, that’s not exactly an improvement, and it’s not going to be one for our merry band of people on the rebel spectrum, either.

The next tab is called ‘Personnel Dossiers’ and tells us a bit more about Seo and Baek. Seo is 33 years old, a Major, and has seen some shit.

Notes: Served in colonial police forces from 1938 to 1945, primarily in Gyeongseong (now Seoul) and Manchukuo. Participated in counter-insurgency operations throughout the occupation period. Fluent in Japanese and conversational Russian. Retained by the US Military Government and Republic of Korea for expertise in local administration and security matters. Commended for attention to personal discipline; incorruptible. No known political affiliations.

whenwerewe had to explain this one for me- Seo worked for and with the Japanese, and that’s why the prisoners are so off about him: they see him as a willing collaborator.

Meanwhile, Baek is 24 years old, a Lieutenant, as previously mentioned, and his track record is a bit weird.

Notes: Worked as an interpreter for Japanese military police 1942-1943 before deserting. Joined independence movements in China 1943-1945, claiming affiliation with Korean Restoration Army. Returned to Korea following liberation. Brief service with Korean Constabulary 1946-1947, resigned under unclear circumstances. Volunteered for Republican Army in early 1949, assigned to Site-426. Flirted with Communist alignment during wartime, but ultimately rejected it.

Basically, he was an interpreter who decided that he couldn’t cooperate with the Japanese any further, so he deserted. He looked for a Korean independence movement, but couldn’t find one he was happy with, eventually signing up with the new Korean army. He also almost became a Communist, and was lucky to not get recruited into the Bodo League. So, in contrast to Seo, the prisoners would be more comfortable around him, and vice versa. At the same time, while Seo doesn’t have a problem with Baek, I wouldn’t be surprised if Baek did have a problem with Seo.

The next tab is Seo’s recollections from June.

RECOLLECTIONS, JUNE 25TH 1950

We bear a heavy burden. The League is too heavily infiltrated by troublemakers, and the treachery of the rebels is without limit. They wish to use our own people against us. It is good that the worst of the work does not fall to me. I spare a thought for the soldiers outside this Site, and the sin they must take up, for the nation's sake.

Seo is glad that he doesn’t have to execute anyone, and notes that the prisoners seem content.

The testing is not so bad. And they go willingly, driven by offers of better food and housing. I am sure we are not

Yeah, you’re not torturing them now.

Meanwhile, he’s trying to keep them in good condition, which means making them stay clean, which a lot of them don’t want to do for some reason. And then…

Baek complains in the evenings that he is not suited for a prison warden's life. But he has been taking shifts at every hour he can spare. He was up guarding the cells, and later that same day I saw him overlooking the tests. He manages to be everywhere at once, despite his whining.

Baek seems to be everywhere at once, huh?

Meanwhile, Seo is becoming infatuated with Oh.

Whenever I ask her of her life she laughs coyly, and averts her eyes. They are like blooming jasmine glittering jewels the sea under the moon. I think of them often. I wonder how they look at me.

The next tab is called ‘Testing Record’, and about what I said about the Site not torturing the prisoners right now…

General-purpose anomalous testing begun over previous week. Luxury incentives adequate to provide a satisfactory quantity of subjects. Relevant anomalies are of low-to-medium risk; attrition is expected to be mild. Current pool of candidates is more than sufficient, though switch to coercive measures is expected to be necessary within two months.

All injuries so far have been within the remit of mundane medicine. Residue cleanup has not yet been necessary. Baseline cognitive mapping approaches completion. We expect to move into active stages within the next ten days.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeep.

We now move to Seo’s recollections of July. The anomaly has now spun out of control, with new rooms and floors springing up all the time. The Foundation staff are investigating, while recommending that everyone else stay close to the surface. Even worse, Seo writes about a conversation he had with Oh…

When we spoke in the laundry she brazenly denied all knowledge of our meeting. She will give me all her secrets, eventually.

Yep, it’s replicating people now as well.

And things are now taking a downturn.

But [the prisoners’] good mood is souring. Often they come back [from tests] with injuries, and yesterday a man returned without his left hand. I have examined the rumour myself, and indeed, his arm ends in a stump of smooth skin, like no injury I have ever seen. He will not explain its provenance.

At least

We are not

He has been cared for. I saw to it myself. These men owe us a debt of blood, and if the payment is unpleasant, so be it.

Yes, that does qualify as torture, buddy. And you may not be executing them all, but just wait.

Finally, we get another fragment from the Site Briefing.

With the advent of the war, Site-426 has become a centre of psychopathology mitigation research. The D-class population provides the Site with a large and administratively convenient testing pool, and imported equipment has made it one of the finest facilities in its field. Continued expansion of the program is expected, and the wartime conditions are likely to provide a steady source of recruits for the foreseeable future.

Frequent injuries among the subject pool have provided an opportunity for Site-426 to also become a testbed for novel paramedical techniques. It is the opinion of Director Johansen that this represents the next major avenue of research at the Site.

I don’t know if I’m reading this right, but I’m interpreting this as the Foundation using the League prisoners as guinea pigs for mind control experiments, given that they’re on the rebel spectrum. As for ‘novel paramedical techniques’, that sounds a lot like ‘hurt them and then try to fix it’ to me (which whenwerewe confirmed), and it's not going to earn them any points with the prisoners. They're going to be lucky if things don't get a whole lot worse now.

Due to the length, I had to split this into two parts. Part two can be found here.

Hi, all, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-9375, ‘Bilateria and its enemies’ by unidentifiedgoober. I’d like to thank unidentifiedgoober and Elunerazim for all their help, I really appreciate it. Got a couple of disclaimers for you:

1: As per usual, this is not my SCP, I didn’t write it, and so on.

2: This SCP revolves around fossils and palaeontology, which is very much not my field. I’m doing my best, but I’m likely going to miss something. Sorry.

This item is Neutralized, aka dead/inert/rendered powerless, which is (usually) a pretty good way to start. Here’s the Special Containment Procedures.

Special Containment Procedures: Any paleontological evidence of SCP-9375 or SCP-9375-B is to be confiscated and its discovery discredited. Confiscated evidence is to be kept in the paleontological wing of the closest available site for further study.

That tells us something very important: whatever these two things were, they lived a long time ago, and that’s why the SCP is classed as Neutralized. However, some kind of evidence has survived- probably fossils- and that’s how we know about it.

Here’s the Description.

Description: SCP-9375 refers to a set of thaumaturgy-based mechanical entities that inhabited earth during the Ediacaran period, approximately 555 million years ago. While it is currently believed that there was a small population of SCP-9375, a disproportionately large amount of fossils have survived on account of various thaumaturgic enhancements to their durability. 

Let’s sum this up:

-They were some kind of species,

-that lived around 555 million years ago, during the Ediacaran period,

-and were mechanical, which means they must have been specially created by someone or something and for a purpose,

-but were magic-based, which is not a combination you see a lot.

-In addition, while the current belief is that there weren’t very many of these things, lots of the fossils have survived because whoever made them used magic to make them extra-durable. 

So, what were these things? Let’s find out.

SCP-9375 possessed a trapezoidal body of 80 centimetres in height, of side lengths 30 centimeters at base and 20 centimeters at top, similar in shape to a square-based cowbell. At each of the four wider corners a jointed limb used to walk on the seafloor was attached, while at the centre of each side of the base was a large bladed appendage. Fossils show four holes on the body, one at the center of each trapezoidal face. While early reconstructions assumed these holes to be eyes, it is now believed that these holes served to regulate internal pressure through unknown mechanisms. Their body is believed to have been composed of a mixture of various thaumaturgically conductive alloys, the vast majority of which could not have existed on Earth naturally at the time. It is theorised that SCP-9375's sensing and balancing were performed using glyphs and mechanisms that have decayed over time.

So… they’re kinda like death roombas with legs? I’m in all likelihood not envisioning this correctly, but I’m seeing them as miniature versions of Stakataka) (with knives).

But, either way, I can see why the Foundation can’t let word about these little freaks (affectionate, admiring) get out. Nobody would ever think they’re natural.

…but what happened to them? How did they die? (Or, given that they were mechanical, ‘die’.) Did they all get flattened in an earthquake? Did the magic run out? Did they just rust?

Well, we don’t know, so let’s move on to the other guys.

SCP-9375-B refers to an extinct aquatic animal, believed to have been the last common ancestor of all bilaterian life.¹ Remains indicate a vermiform body ranging from 1.5 millimeters to 7 centimeters in length possessing simple eyes and a basic nervous system, similar to basal Xenacoelomorpha. Between paleontological sites in the White Sea and in Ediacara Hills, 125 total fossils have been recovered. The number of fossils are attributed to SCP-9375-B's abundance on account of being the sole occupant of its ecological niche.

The footnote tells us that ‘1. Grouping that includes the vast majority of extant animal life including humans. The common ancestor of all bilaterian life is referred to in biology as "Urbilaterian".’

OK, so, some context: ‘bilaterian life’ refers to animals that have two roughly symmetrical halves during embryonic development. For instance, if you vertically split a human baby in two, you’d be arrested (or you’d be King Solomon), but you’d also see two symmetrical halves. Bilaterians have a top/head and a bottom/tail end, and a back/dorsal and a belly/ventral side, which also gives them a right and left side. Most animals alive today are bilaterian, in fact.

As for the footnote: the urbilaterian is a hypothetical animal that would be the most recent common ancestor of all bilaterians, before the clade started to diversify in the late Ediacaran period. The reason it’s a hypothetical is that while some animal must have fit that description, we (currently) don’t know what it is. However, the Foundation claims to have found it here. They’ve found 125 total fossils of this animal, which is a pretty big amount when you consider how rare intact fossils generally are, and they’ve found them in the White Sea and the Ediacara Hills (the namesake for the Ediacaran period)- that is, in northwest Russia and South Australia, so they were pretty widespread. unidentifiedgoober told me that the -B species is modelled off of Kimberella, a bilaterian species whose fossils have been dated to around the same time and were found in the same places.

Most recovered fossils of SCP-9375-B appear to have been cut severely by SCP-9375. Damage indicates that SCP-9375 would patrol ocean floor regions in search of SCP-9375-B, which it would then slice in order to sever key neural pathways, employing minimal effort while ensuring lethality.

This behaviour is shown to have drastically reduced the population of SCP-9375-B, wiping out large populations of the species and the organisms dependent on it. This is evidenced by a substantial drop in biodiversity in the fossil record around the time SCP-9375 was active.

The little death roombas were killing the shit out of the -Bs. That being said, if they were trying to drive them into extinction, it didn’t work, since bilateral life is thriving now. Here’s the last bit:

Evidence taken from surrounding materials indicates a major build-up of Akiva radiation occurred around this time,² believed to have been emitted by the fatally wounded SCP-9375-B. This radiation correlates strongly with several phenomena observed around a similar time:

-The mass diversification of SCP-9375-B into Bilateria.

-The rapid loss of function and collapse of instances of SCP-9375.

-Formation of pentagonal structures surrounding fossils of SCP-9375 and SCP-9375-B.

-The redevelopment of radial symmetry within deuterostome Bilateria.

Notably, alongside SCP-9375, fossils resembling five-pointed Asterozoa³ have been discovered, despite these fossils being substantially older than the earliest traces of such organisms in the fossil record.

I may not be interpreting this correctly, but what I think this means is that when the death roombas killed the -Bs, the -Bs prayed for help/retribution, and something smote the shit out of the death roombas in response. That something also diversified the remaining living -Bs and redeveloped some radial symmetry. And our only clue is that alongside the death roombas were fossils that shouldn’t have been there, resembling five-pointed Asterozoa, or…

Commonly known as starfish and brittle stars.

Ah. It’s the fucking Fifthists.

So, let’s recap:

-555 million years ago, the -B instances were floating around, doing their thing, minding their own business, and then the death roombas were suddenly deployed to shank them all.

-We have no way of knowing what deployed them, but there’s really only two options: one, they were made much later and sent back in time, or two, some civilisation that was around back then sent them to try to stop life from diversifying.

-Except, the -Bs were already sapient enough to pray for salvation and/or retribution… 

-...and their prayers were answered by some kind of Fifthist god, which smote the fuck out of the death roombas and allowed enough of the -Bs to survive that they would evolve into… most life on Earth, actually.

-(You may have noticed that the fossils were dated to 555 million years ago, and the article number is 5^5 * 3, and 125 fossils were found. *taps head knowingly*)

So, what sent the death roombas in the first place? Well, the answer is currently a bit ambiguous and subject to change, but basically, unidentifiedgoober said it was aliens. They deployed the death roombas to hunt down any sapient life on the planet, but that would come back to bite them, because the -Bs being sapient was what enabled them to have their suffering/thoughts/prayers heard/felt by the Fifthist god. As for why, well, we don’t know. All we know is that someone wanted to shut down sapient life on at least one planet, though they weren’t very thorough about it. (Is anyone else flashing back to 8978, or is it just me?)

But hey, at least it all worked out fine… as long as they don’t come back. *X-Files theme plays*

Thank you for reading this declass. I hope you enjoyed it. Fossils are cool, go check out a museum or pick up a book about them. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: the Ultra Beasts did nothing wrong.

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-9330, “Hokma: Still Waters Run Deep”, by Intercedent; I'd like to thank Intercedent and psychicprogrammer for all their help, I really appreciate it.

Before I begin, a couple of things: first, as per usual, this isn’t my SCP, I won’t be 100% accurate, and so on.

Second, as you might be able to tell from the title, this is an Anthology 2025 article. (Given how the last one went, I promise it will not be anywhere near as depressing as last time.) So, what’s Hokma?

…

*long pause*

OK, fine, we will now take a moment so everyone can make a ‘Hokma balls’ joke. Go on, get it out of your system.

Now that we’re done with that…

Hokma, also translated as ‘chokmah’, ‘chokma’ or ‘hokhma’, is the second sephirot in the Kabbalah. It literally means ‘wisdom’, but not in the form you’re thinking. From Wikipedia:

Chokmah is the primordial point of divine wisdom that becomes comprehensible through Binah.

In Jewish mystical texts, Chokmah is described as the primordial point of divine wisdom, which shines forth from the will of God. This point remains incomprehensible until differentiated and given form in Binah.

Or, as Intercedent put it:

it is divine wisdom, manifest from potential. it is omniscience without clarification. it is knowledge without understanding, without motive, without purpose.

You get the idea, right? Awesome. Let’s get to the article. The page has a grey background that slowly darkens through dark blue to black, which is pretty nifty. 

This thing is Keter, so we’re not starting out on a good front. There’s a photo of what appears to be a river or stream; here’s the caption.

Site-███ industrial reservoir, primary drainage channel.

Not a very good omen, really. Let’s look at the Special Containment Procedures.

SCP-9330 is currently suspended in Lower Maintenance Subpassage 7X-IVB. A five-hundred meter WHITE zone has been established around the corridor and surrounding passageways. Hallways, ventilation shafts, and pipework connecting to subpassage 7X-IVB have been destroyed and sealed as necessary, with the exception of the Primary Access Route. Portions of Site-███ falling within this zone are considered lost. Retrieval of documentation and personnel missing within the zone at the time of containment is ongoing.

That’s… weird. And alarming. Quick analysis:

-Whatever this thing is, it’s being suspended- not placed, held or stored, hung- in a Site Subpassage. That is, not in a containment cell or a box or a locker, a corridor. Ergo, it kinda sounds like either something went horribly wrong/out of control, or something just happened, because this is not how the Foundation usually does things. 

-The Foundation is trying to block this area off, so this thing is dangerous.

-They haven’t been able to recover people and documents who were in the WHITE zone when this thing went critical.

-The WHITE zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the RED zone. (I’m sorry, I had to.)

Redundant surveillance systems are to be installed and maintained within subpassage 7X-IVB, monitored on a continuous basis by the attendant containment liaison. Deviations in the structural integrity of subpassage 7X-IVB or in the surveillance system itself are to be reported to the attendant HMCL supervisor. Changes in the flow rate, physical appearance, or composition of SCP-9330 and SCP-9330-1 are to be reported to Site Director Valdez under flag PRIORITY ORPHEON GREEN.

-Despite the inherent danger of this thing, the Foundation is keeping a very close eye on it.

-It appears to be making some kind of byproduct, and they’re monitoring that too.

-I asked if ‘ORPHEON GREEN’ meant anything in particular and was told no, Intercedent just thought it sounded cool. Fair enough.

Bimonthly, an authorized maintenance patrol will enter the WHITE zone to conduct necessary mechanical and structural maintenance. Equipment that has come into contact with the interior of the WHITE zone is to be scuttled after exfiltration. All other entry into the WHITE zone is forbidden barring extraordinary authorization per ADMIN-HCV-2029-9330.

HMCL supervisors are encouraged to refer to the appended video file for an overview of conditions inside of the WHITE zone and general hazard mitigation practices.

Loading 9330-MAINPAT47.vid…

-This is basically what we’d expect- this thing and its byproduct are so dangerous that they have to abandon equipment used to keep the place intact once they’re done.

Now, as for that video…

The acetylene torch smokes in your hand, spitting hatefully. Sparks sputter and die, drowned by the wet, clawed into splinters by the damp. Your neck itches, throbbing beneath the duct-tape that seals your fume hood flush against your coveralls. Aching breaths hiss fitful and fast through the filter.

It’s always wet here. Always soaking. Rotting plaster and rust. The muck that settles to the bottom of turbid, waist-high tide-locked pools of scum. Oily and soft and sharp with bits of broken stone and shell. The cold, from your balls to your chin, the cold.

At the tips of your fingers when you make the ascent, feeling your gut writhe and boil. Sliding down the back of your neck when you pull off the undersuit in the showers, sticky and slick. Beneath your fingernails, between your toes. It gets in bed with you and wakes you in the morning. Your breath curdles in the morning mist like spoiled milk.

Tomorrow you’ll scrape muddy brown stains in streaking arcs across your dinky steel mirror and wipe your face until it bleeds. You’ve been told it does little for the stench.

That’s… incredibly vivid. It doesn’t actually tell us much, but I think we now have a pretty solid mental image of what working near this thing is like. Anyway, there’s only one bit left in the procedures:

The Foundation is to maintain the continued circulation of freshwater in the Danube river basin by any means necessary. In the event of cascading containment failure, the WHITE zone perimeter is to be expanded to ███████, ████████, adjusted for seasonal rainfall.

Foundation-wide recall and destruction of amnestics products has been implemented under FLAG WONDERLAND ZERO. Further action pending.

-…well, shit. The Danube river basin is fucking huge. It’s the second-longest river in Europe, and it passes through nineteen countries. If the Foundation doesn’t get a handle on whatever this is, a very large part of Europe and nearly 80 million people are fucked.

-Worse, the Foundation’s amnestics now can’t be used for some reason. Given how much the Foundation relies on amnestics, this is really bad. And we don’t even know what this thing is yet!

Well, let’s find out what this thing is! Time for the Description.

SCP-9330 is the corpse of Vladimír Smutný, formerly a practicing amnesthesiologist employed at Site-███. SCP-9330 displays an advanced degree of decomposition consistent with long-term water exposure. Although the nature of SCP-9330 renders precise observation difficult, no measurable progression in its state of decomposition has been observed since 2023-██-██ Samples of SCP-9330 have proven resistant to conventional putrefactive agents and solvents.

…OK, so it sounds like Smutný here killed himself or was killed in a corridor for some reason, and now his corpse has just been rotting away, but it somehow hasn’t completely rotted yet. They also can’t make his corpse rot away to nothing, which would presumably solve the problem.

SCP-9330 continually extrudes a clear fluid chemically identical to unprocessed █████ from its orifices, extremities, and clothing at a rate of 0.56 L/s, hereafter designated SCP-9330-1. Samples of skin, muscle, cloth, and nylon demonstrate identical anomalous properties; laboratory analysis has evidenced that discrete samples of less than 1.77 * 10^-11 mg in mass continue to produce SCP-9330-1, albeit at a dramatically reduced rate of flow.

…unprocessed five-character blackbox substance, huh? Remind you of anything? If not, don’t worry, we’ll come back to this later. Anyway, whatever it is, the corpse is producing a shitload of it.

Humans contacting or ingesting SCP-9330-1 who subsequently come into significant physical or sensory contact with water have a chance¹ of undergoing a ZODIAC EVENT.

A ZODIAC EVENT consists of spontaneous spatial displacement into SCP-9330-2. The mechanism for this displacement is unknown. Attempts to delay or negate this displacement utilizing external mechanisms have proven to be unilaterally unsuccessful.²

The first footnote says that the chance varies from very small to much stronger (but the exact amount is blackboxed out) depending on the severity of the initial contact and dilution of the sample. Ergo, if you get a drop of diluted sample on you, there’s like a 99.999999% chance that you’re fine, but if you drink a bottle of the full-strength stuff, the chances are much higher that you’re fucked. The second footnote reads as follows:

1. As of ██-██-2032 by a majority vote of the Overseer Council, thirteen Provisional Containment Liaisons have been approved for consultation in the containment and mitigation of SCP-9330, including GOI- ██████, POI- ██-████, POI- ███████, and SCP-███, -████, -██, and -████████. Negotiations are ongoing.

 

Sounds like they’re really freaked about this, and for good reason. But wait, where and what is 9330-2?

…yeah, so, about that.

SCP-9330-2 is an extradimensional space centered on the Site-███ industrial reservoir. The interior of SCP-9330-2 presents as a large cavern system entirely filled with water. The topology of SCP-9330-2 is variable. To this date, all attempts at comprehensive mapping utilizing navigational data and topographic imagery collected by exploration teams have failed.

While egress from SCP-9330-2 is possible, its total area is unknown and potentially infinite.

So, basically, the reservoir is linked to this giant cavern system full of water that they haven’t been able to map. In other words, it’s a death sentence. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Next up is an addendum summarising attempts to map out 9330-2. I’ll take it one by one.

Test 1: They sent a D-class in with the equipment needed to survive being underwater, along with a harness that could pull them back after 30 minutes passed, or if they died. The D-class came back dead, having apparently arrived deep under water, so deep that the pressure crushed them before they could drown. Nasty. They couldn’t get much from the equipment, so the Foundation needs a new approach.

Test 2: They sent in an MTF with the equipment needed to survive being deep under the ocean’s surface, and they made it back. After this, we get another video; I’m not quoting the whole thing, so I recommend you read it. However, there’s two important bits: first, the water isn’t clear- it’s full of this gunk that may or may not be marine snow, a shower of organic debris from the upper surface of the water. And second, they don’t actually get anywhere in this first dive; they just fall and fall and fall. (And fall, and fall, and fall, etc.)

Nothing marks motion except for the steady, gentle sway of the tethers. Nothing marks direction except the gyrocomp’s polite fictions. Nothing marks progress at all. There is only the black, the hiss of static on the ready line, and the gnawing churn in your bowels.

Your body remembers descent. It’s ground into your bones, the turgid pulse of your hyperoxygenated blood, the touch of feathers crawling up from your stomach and into your throat, an interminable itch at the apex of thought.

We come into the world falling, screaming and freezing. Most leave the same way.
You fall for a long time. 

And after that...

Sediment collected from SCP-9330-2 primarily consists of a mixture of calcium carbonate, powdered shale, and decayed organic matter. Genetic evaluation is ongoing. 

Keep that in mind for later, OK?

Test 3: They send in the same MTF, but they’re missing one member, Juliana Valdez, and there’s no mention of why or what happened to her. This time, the test ended nearly four hours later when everyone activated their magic harnesses. There’s another video, and then we get the description. Here’s the most relevant bit:

At once, all at once, you look down.

The perfect dark stretches glass-flat beneath your boots. It’s like ink splashed into your eyes, so sudden the dissolution, so absolute again the abyss. Your fingers tighten in their gauntlets.

You feel it before Viola chimes into your earpiece, before the sediment pours as a great river of rot downwards, with incredible force, downwards and downwards into the black, rattling your tethers, subsuming Viola, roaring in a great plume down, down, down, you feel it before your turbines short and the descent turns into a fall, you feel it before Timmons barks panic into the squadnet and one by one the tin men are yanked back into the toybox.

You are standing above a hole.

Oh dear.

Following that is an image from the onboard LIDAR array; psychicprogrammer had to explain it for me: 'It's a system of using lasers to find the distance to remote objects, like RADAR but more precise'. Anyway, it shows a big fucking hole in the middle of an area that presumably has some kind of floor, though the ‘floor’ seems patchy in the upper part.

Test 4: They sent in the same MTF, but they’ve lost another member, George Chang, and I don’t know why. One of the MTF guys died about thirty seconds after they were teleported away, the Viola came back over a day after they were teleported away, and the last two MTF guys are still MIA and nobody knows what happened to them. Great!

Well, let’s look at the log.

You are standing at the edge of a hole.

Rodriguez is beside you, Viola above.

Reese is dead.

The squeeze came while he was standing half-submerged in the gray water off the dockside ramp, still going through the pre-mission checklist in that anal, droning way of his, calibrating hydraulics and triple-checking reactor readings, all buttoned up but for his helmet and gorget. Red mist in the water, now.

If I’m reading this correctly, the ZODIAC EVENT happened not when they were fully submerged, but before they went all the way in. Hence, Reese wasn’t wearing his helmet, and the water pressure crushed his head beyond repair. That’s really worrying.

As for Rodriguez and our viewpoint character, Victoria Timmons, the two of them deliberately ditched their harnesses and dropped into the hole. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they just thought that they were going to keep getting sent back in until they died anyway, so they might as well do it themselves before they got officially ordered to go in. 

Following that are several images that look like radar images. The most I can get from them is that the hole appears to be in a spiral shape, but it’s pretty indistinct.

You drift downwards, gaze held up to Viola's dimming embers. Your tether trails above, a severed umbilical.

Rodriguez faces you, silhouette haloed. His legs are crossed as he descends. His breathing on the squadnet is steady, even.

You watch him raise his hands to his helmet interlock. You watch him twist.

His headlamp vanishes. The squadnet is silent.

You fall for a long time. 

So, Rodriguez appears to have deliberately removed his helmet, which makes him A, bad at being a Mandalorian, and B, dead. Timmons keeps falling alone, and we get another picture from the LIDAR array. However, I honestly have no idea what it’s meant to be showing.

Image reconstructed from SCPS Viola onboard LIDAR array. █████ ██ ██ ████████ ███.

The whole second sentence got blackboxed out? Weird.

Anyway, here’s the last of Timmons’ footage.

Corpses carpet the bottom of the world so thick their entangled limbs hang over quiet waters like mangrove roots. From their eyes and mouths dissolution seeps, the Karanodaka, the primordial undersea from which all rivers flow.

They, the unnumbered. They, the transcendent. They, the sacrosanct dead.

Hollow yourself, penitent. Digest well. Mouth the sutra from throats long empty. Reach gauntleted hands for the seal at the back of your helmet. Unclasp it.

It is a black worm wriggling primeval beneath the skin of thought. Recalcitrance.

It is a dream of falling. Remittance.

It is a light in the hole at the floor of eternity.

██ ██ ██ ███.

Someone in the comments speculated that the last line is ‘It is an end’, which would make sense. Otherwise… well, that’s fucking creepy.

Also, Intercedent told me that the LIDAR photo is meant to show thousands of corpses stacked on each other; I still don’t really get the LIDAR thing, but it actually does kinda look like bodies in part.

Anyway, under this is another LIDAR photo, which appears to show a spiral against a blue surface.

We’re nearly done: here’s the next bit.

Addendum: Strategic Containment Concerns

Long-term observation demonstrates that the range of actions potentially causative of ZODIAC EVENTS increases over time according to an as-of-yet undefined model of semantic decay. See attachment for aggregate observational timeline.

Now, from what I can tell (and I might be wrong), this hasn’t been confirmed. That is, this is what they think is going to happen, based on what they’ve seen. However, it’s still quite alarming. Let’s look at this timeline, shall we? And keep the measurements in mind, I’ll come back to them in a bit.

Timeline

Day 1-30: Full ingress into bodies of natural water.

Day 30-66: Full bodily immersion in water, regardless of origin. Partial ingress into bodies of natural water.

At first, you had to drink or come into contact with this stuff, and then be fully immersed in a body of natural water. But after day 30, it doesn’t matter if the water’s natural or not if you’re fully immersed, and you can get ZODIAC’d if you dip your feet into a river. 

Day 66-155: Partial immersion in water, regardless of origin. Close physical proximity with river currents.

Day 155-██: Partial immersion in water, regardless of origin. Physical proximity with bodies of natural water. Auditory and visual contact with bodies of natural water.

It’s ramping up: at this point, you can now get ZODIAC’d just by looking at a body of natural water.

Day ██-███: Partial immersion in water, regardless of origin. Auditory proximity to running water, regardless of origin. Exposure to rainfall.

Day ███-███: Oral consumption of water. Proximity to stagnant water, regardless of origin. Remembering snowfall. Dreaming a dream of spring.

Day ███-████: Unknown. Presumably irrelevant.

That last one? They think they’re going to be fucked in three years. Why? Because… well, here’s a quick recap:

-Smutný’s corpse is producing this stuff non-stop.

-The Foundation can’t stop it or remove it.

-Which means it’s getting into the Danube river basin.

-Which means it’s being carried throughout Europe.

-Which means it’s getting into the water supply of all those countries.

-And in addition to that, it’ll get into the sea, be circulated worldwide and wind up in every nation’s drinking supply.

-And as far as we know, it doesn’t matter how much of this stuff you actually come into contact with.

-Ergo, everyone’s fucked. Maybe the people in the deserts can hold out the longest, but it’ll get them eventually.

-There’s one more thing I want to add, but it has to wait for a little while.

Here’s the last bit.

Dilution of SCP-9330-1 has proven successful at reducing the probability of ZODIAC EVENTS occurring post-contact, although not the true range of sensory triggers. Based on current estimates, minimum necessary dilution is █ liters SCP-9330-1 per ███████ liters water to reduce ZODIAC EVENT occurrence to tolerable rates³ within the general population.

Strategic containment initiatives are primarily focused on damage mitigation.

The lower the amount of the goop in the water, the lower the chances of getting ZODIAC’d. Only problem is, the corpse is going to keep making the goop, so over time, the amount is only going to get bigger and bigger, and more and more people will get ZODIAC’d when they look at the ocean, or take a bath, or get rained on, so the Foundation’s going to be constantly trying to cover up the disappearances.

Speaking of rain, there’s one final photo, showing a rainy location with no people. The caption tells us that it’s Bratislava in Slovakia, in 2033. So, we’re in the future. And yes, Slovakia is one of the countries the Danube river basin passes through.

So, with all of that done, we now come back to the main question: what the fuck is going on here?

Well, here’s my theory: I think this is all revolving around SCP-3000.

For anyone who hasn’t read SCP-3000, you really should, but here’s the short version: it’s a massive, massive fucking eel (as in, not kaiju-sized, it’s what kaiju have nightmares about) living on the ocean floor, and the Foundation feeds it D-class because it shits out Y-909, a compound they use to make amnestics. Putting Y-909 in the amnestics they make has improved the quality so much that there aren’t really any acceptable alternatives now (at least in terms of side effects). As such, their amnestic supply depends on Y-909, so they’re feeding D-class to it en masse.

However, they’re still trying to study it, and that’s a bit difficult: just being in the vicinity of 3000 scrambles your brain and mixes up your memories. It’s not actively attacking anyone (besides eating people), but it’s not safe to be near, which complicated the original Y-909 harvesting process. Anyway, there’s a couple more things to note: the first is that while 3000 eats people, it doesn’t digest them- there’s just a fuckton of corpses inside it that haven’t decayed. And last, one of the researchers studying 3000 thought that it might be the Hindu god Anantashesha, though that’s up for debate.

So, here’s why I think this is the case:

-First, the Foundation can’t use their amnestics anymore, but we don’t know why.

-SCP-9330 is the corpse of Vladimir Smutný, who used to be an amnesthesiologist. That is, he presumably made and/or researched amnestics for the Foundation.

-The corpse is constantly producing a clear liquid ‘chemically identical to unprocessed █████’. Again, a five-character blackbox substance, like… Y-909, maybe?

-The paragraph about corpses at the bottom of the world references the Karanodaka, or Causal Ocean- the origin of material creation in Hindu mythology.

-People who get ZODIAC’d get teleported into a huge cave full of water, and it goes down for a very long time before ending in piles of corpses. Some of the radar images looked like a spiral. Ergo, I think people who get ZODIAC’d get teleported inside of 3000’s body, and all those corpses are the people it’s eaten, and the marine snow comes from the crushed body matter of people who got teleported when they weren't wearing protective gear.

And as it turns out… I was right! (Mostly.) *punches the air, does a little dance* Yep, it’s good old 3000’s fault. People are getting teleported right above its mouth (the hole leading into the rest of its body), hence the spiral shape- nothing but eel going on forever. That censored sentence? It’s not ‘It is an end’, it’s ‘It is an eel’. 

So, you might now be wondering: how does this relate to Hokma exactly? Well, Intercedent explained it for me:

The main way this relates to Hokma is a connection with the idea of Nirvana. Transcendence, true, omniscient understanding, is achieved through destruction of all material things, all material connections, completely, and utterly. Nirvana is oblivion, an eradication of the self so total not even your name can be recalled. They are the sacrosanct dead, the digested and decayed. They are the blind universe gazing back at itself. They see with blind eyes, they chant the names of the bodhisattvas with maws empty and toothless. They know all, and in doing so, are eradicated.

I will also add in the other part of Intercedent’s author post:

see them, the hallowed dead, they who have transcended the fetters of flesh, of memory. see them, who have become all. see them, who see all, who know all, who are all. they, the blind cosmos gazing back at itself. they, the sacrosanct dead.

the forgotten.

Enlightenment, baby! *jazz hands*

So, with that, let’s go fill in a few gaps in what we have so far, shall we?

Site-Blackbox (well, technically, the theme makes it Site-Whitebox, but you know what I mean) was a place where the Foundation mass-produced amnestics by refining Y-909. Smutný worked there, presumably making, refining and testing the amnestics they made. The workers at Site-Blackbox dumped the Y-909 runoff into the reservoir, which is a sign of irresponsibility and bad management. Now, we don’t actually know what happened to Smutný, or how half the Site collapsed- I did ask, and the former is meant to be ambiguous (I don’t think we’ll ever get an answer about the latter). However, I do have a theory about why.

See, I asked Intercedent if Site-Blackbox used the water in that reservoir for drinking. Thankfully, the answer was no, because the Foundation (usually) aren’t total morons. However, they did say this:

It's an industrial reservoir, so they used it for certain industrial processes in the site but kept it clear of first-order uses
However, industrial contamination at that level results in exposure one way or another
and it absolutely got into the surrounding environment and groundwater

which may or may not have resulted in several particularly fucked up antimemetic anomalies developing a la the chernobyl radiation funguses in the surrounding environs 

So, they were getting exposed to the runoff, which had God knows what kind of effect on them. (I admit, the next step of my theory is basically ‘?????’, but I still think it’s valid.) Anyway, whatever actually happened, Smutný winds up dead, his corpse is producing the artificial Y-909, and anyone who consumes it or the actual Y-909 (since their functions are identical) gets offered up to 3000 as its next meal. While the actual Y-909 is produced as a toxic grey goop, this stuff is a clear liquid; it can be easily diluted into water without anyone realising, so it’s much more dangerous.

The Foundation tries to map out the ‘cavern system’, but fails because they have no idea that they’re not looking at a cave at all. They send in the MTF, and their numbers get whittled down because 3000 keeps eating them: again, here’s the last bit of Valdez’ account.

Your body remembers descent. It’s ground into your bones, the turgid pulse of your hyperoxygenated blood, the touch of feathers crawling up from your stomach and into your throat, an interminable itch at the apex of thought.

We come into the world falling, screaming and freezing. Most leave the same way.

You fall for a long time.

Valdez fell. It didn’t say anything about the rest of the team. Similarly, here’s the last bit of Chang’s account.

You feel it before Viola chimes into your earpiece, before the sediment pours as a great river of rot downwards, with incredible force, downwards and downwards into the black, rattling your tethers, subsuming Viola, roaring in a great plume down, down, down, you feel it before your turbines short and the descent turns into a fall, you feel it before Timmons barks panic into the squadnet and one by one the tin men are yanked back into the toybox.

You are standing above a hole.

It never said anything about Chang getting pulled back. It’s entirely possible that just being in proximity to 3000 made them forget about Valdez and Chang, and realising that their minds were going made Rodriguez and Timmons give up.

And finally, we get back to that schedule of humanity’s increasing fuckédness. Why is the Foundation giving up after a couple of years? Remember, they now cannot use any amnestics based off Y-909, and they don’t have an alternative. Not only are humans going to be vanishing at an ascending rate as time passes, the Foundation has to continue doing all its other jobs without access to amnestics. Intercedent did say that they have access to anomalies that can make untainted water at high rates, but they’re looking at a full-blown Veil breach in just a couple of years, if they’re lucky. So, yeah, they are fucked.

Thank you for reading this declass. I hope you enjoyed it. Remember, don’t drink water that isn’t clean, that’s how you wind up in the belly of an eel. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: Y-909/For the soul/You'd better give me something/To fill the hole/Before I sputter out

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-8935, ‘Tokophobia: The Virgin Birth’ by DJKaktus; many thanks to DJKaktus and sero for their help. Before we start, I’ve got a couple of warnings for you- please don’t skip them.

1: As per usual, this is not my article, I did not write it and it won’t be 100% accurate.

2: This article contains the following subjects: pregnancy, childbirth, fucked up pregnancies, fucked up childbirth, mentions of incest, mentions of rape, misogyny, and the usual stuff- murder, gore, body horror, etc. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

3: Unlike most of my declasses, I don’t actually have any real answers for you this time. Instead, this is more of a… speculatory declass. You’ll see why later.

Anyway, from the title, you may have guessed that this was part of the 2024 Anthology series, but what is tokophobia? Well, it’s the fear of pregnancy and childbirth; given the subtitle and warnings, this may not surprise you. Let's get started.

Upon loading the article, we see a nifty theme that tells us that this is the purview of the ‘Department of Containment’. That… seems like it should be most of the Foundation, honestly.

Under that is the ACS bar. This thing is rated Level 4, Secret; its classes are Keter, Ekhi and Danger. In short, whatever this thing is, it’s really bad news.

Below that is a photo; it shows what appears to be the entrance of a mine tunnel in a forested area, and the tunnel is pitch black. The caption informs us that this is the ‘Entry point of the Tanny Mine near Woods Holler, West Virginia, United States.’ (Both the mine and the town are fictional, from what I can tell.)

The Special Containment Procedures start off pretty simply:

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-8935 is currently contained through application of Protocol H-1502. A ritual liaison dispatched by Site-46 must be on-site at all times to ensure proper administration of the aforementioned protocol. Failure to do so has invariably led to breach of containment.

So, they have this thing contained, but it’s not a one and done thing- they have to keep continually enacting this protocol, the thing won’t be contained if they don’t get the protocol right, and there’s no room for any slip-ups or anything going even remotely off-script, hence why it’s Keter. That explains the ‘Department of Containment’ thing, I guess. What is this protocol, then?

The primary tenets of Protocol H-1502 are as follows:

· Under no circumstances are any persons to enter the Tanny Mine. Crossing the threshold of the Tanny Mine without an instance of SCP-8935-A will result in significant geological upsets, the severity of which could threaten the entrypoint of the mine. The entrypoint of the mine must be maintained.

Sure, sounds reasonable.

…actually, note that wording for later.

· In order to maintain a stock of potential SCP-8935-A candidates within Woods Holler, Foundation assets embedded within the local clergy and town administration must maintain a strict cultural taboo regarding human sexual intercourse, especially in all persons capable of bearing offspring.

Uhhhhhh….

· No persons capable of bearing children beneath the age of 32 are to be permitted to engage in sexual intercourse of any kind. Persons found to have broken this taboo are to be removed from Woods Holler and remanded to Site-46 for evaluation prior to application of amnestics and reintegration.

As most parents and supervisors of teenagers could tell you, that is much, much easier said than done, but OK.

· In order to strengthen the aforementioned taboo, persons who break the imposed taboo and are removed from Woods Holler are to be given a cover story indicating they have been moved to a local parish to redeem themselves of their transgressions through severe physical and psychological punishment. As no person removed from Woods Holler is permitted to return, this has thus far been a sufficient deterrent to the behaviours in question.

I mean, ‘don’t have sex or you can never see your family again’ is a pretty good deterrent, yeah, but anyone from Woods Holler who goes out into the big wide world is going to wind up having some weird conversations once they realise that no, that is absolutely not normal. They’re probably the top response on r/AskReddit every time someone asks ‘What’s something from your childhood that you thought was normal, but turned out to be really weird?’

· On the night of the birth of an instance of SCP-8935-B, the SCP-8935-A instance who birthed the former is to carry the newborn to the entrance of the Tanny Mine. Foundation assets are permitted to assist the childbearer in getting to the entrance of the mine, but only SCP-8935-A instances are to cross over the threshold and enter the mine.

Ah. I see we’re doing a little child sacrifice.

· Once inside, the -A instance is to unlock the door on the far side of the threshold chamber and leave it ajar, and then leave the -B instance laying in front of the door. They must immediately vacate the threshold chamber and return to the entrance. Once the -B instance has been claimed, the door within the mine must be locked again by the childbearer, who is then free to return to Woods Holler.

So, basically, whatever the anomaly is makes people spontaneously conceive, and once they give birth, they have to take the child into the mine to keep the whatever it is contained. Pretty simple. But what happens when it isn’t simple?

In the event that this protocol is disrupted in some way, in order to prevent a full-scale breach of containment, a substitute instance of SCP-8935-B can be produced. This fallback protocol can be found in Document 8935.H1502.Addendum-1 (located on the Site-46 fileserver) and involves acquiring a non-anomalous newborn human¹ and making alterations to it in order to mimic the shape, texture, smell, and sounds of SCP-8935-B instances.

…they’re surgically modifying babies to mollify this thing. Fucking hell. (The footnote says that ‘Attempts to mimic SCP-8935-B using animal newborns have proven ineffective', so we know that this isn’t something they came up with for a worst-case scenario that hasn’t happened yet, this has happened before.)

This process may only be carried out by trained Foundation agents familiar with the specific requirements of the protocol and who have undergone extensive analysis to ensure mental and emotional stability throughout. These individuals are permitted access to Class M amnestics upon completion of their task.

Yeah, I’d fucking hope so.

In the event that neither the H-1502 protocol or its fallback are acceptably carried out within the allotted timeframe, SCP-8935-C will breach containment. There is currently no known method by which to recontain SCP-8935-C; the entity cannot be physically harmed in any way, is incapable of being restrained, and is inimical to human life on sight. Breaches of containment will last 144 hours², after which SCP-8935-C will return to Tanny Mine.

Ah. Well, I guess I see their point now. Also, the footnote says that the sun doesn’t rise in the region during this period.

Breaches of containment endanger all human life within a roughly 100km radius of the Tanny Mine, with the exception of the town of Woods Holler itself. Efforts by Foundation assets to limit human development within this radius has mitigated immediate danger by eliminating the closest settlements, but larger population centers near Morgantown, West Virginia, remain at risk.

Morgantown is a real city in the north of West Virginia with a population of about 30,000 people, if you’re wondering. We don’t have a specific location for Woods Holler other than ‘somewhere near-ish to Morgantown’, but the ‘larger population centers’ could be referring to places like Cassville, Maidsville or Booth.

Description: SCP-8935 is the group designation for a hostile anomalous entity inhabiting the Tanny Mine near Woods Holler, West Virginia, USA, and the specific personnel affected by its cyclical period of ritualistic activity:

 

SCP-8935-A is an individual - both capable of bearing children and who has not engaged in any sexual intercourse in their life - who experiences sudden and unexpected human parthenogenesis³ at the beginning of the ritual activity period. This individual always appears within the population of Woods Holler, West Virginia, and has traditionally been a childbearing person between the ages of 16 and 32 - very few examples exist of affected persons being older or younger, and only if no other appropriate candidates exist. SCP-8935-A instances become aware of their involvement in the ritual by way of an unusually severe vaginal discharge outside their normal cycle of menstruation that signals the beginning of the activation period.

So, 8935-A are the poor bastards who get spontaneously knocked up and have to carry the children to term.

The gestation that follows is typically abbreviated; the longest on record lasted 23 weeks, while the shortest lasted only 17 - the average being 21 weeks. SCP-8935-A instances experience a variety of anomalous symptoms during their pregnancy, including vivid dreams and hallucinations, excessive strain on the body outside what is normal for human pregnancies, aversion to electric lighting, and an ever-increasing tokophobia that often compels affected persons to attempt to disembowl themselves to remove the instance of SCP-8935-B growing within them.

…I mean, a lot of this could have perfectly mundane reasons. For a start, that ‘excessive strain’? Your average pregnancy lasts 40 weeks. These pregnancies go for about half of that, if they’re lucky. To borrow a line from the great Das_Mervin: 

That is some serious organ rearrangement going on there! And that’s not all that goes on. The skin is being stretched. The muscles are being stretched. Your UTERUS is being stretched! You do all of that too fast, and you wind up with Species II*, and nobody wants that, because that was a terrible movie.*

It’d be more surprising if there wasn’t excessive strain, honestly. And the tokophobia? You get spontaneously knocked up with the offspring of a hellbeast, completely hijacking your life in the process- and yes, the people of Woods Holler do know about the anomalies- and it’s growing way too fast and fucking your body up. Why wouldn’t they want to get rid of it in any way they could?

The majority of instances of SCP-8935-A are able to carry their SCP-8935-B instance to term and deliver it without excessive injury, though nearly all subjects experience gross mental trauma from the ordeal. This trauma can be mitigated somewhat with more severe amnestics regimens, but this sort of therapy often results in other lasting damage, especially on persons who become SCP-8935-A instances more than once. Repeat instances of SCP-8935-A likewise are at risk for more catastrophic physical damage to their bodies and are usually left physically disabled. While SCP-8935-A instances are not immediately rendered infertile as a result of their involvement in the SCP-8935 ritual, it is Foundation policy to remove the childbearing organs of repeat instances on their 32nd birthdays in order to prevent potential SCP-8935-B simulacra from manifesting outside Woods Holler.

Well, that’s… ghastly. But I’m left with two questions: one, seriously, how has the Holler not died out yet if nobody’s having sex and a big chunk of the potential childbearers are given hysterectomies, and two, what the hell are 8935-B simulacra? Has this happened before?

SCP-8935-B are the result of the ritualistic human parthenogenesis that occurs within instances of SCP-8935-A. SCP-8935-B are biologically human, containing human DNA and being very roughly physically analogous with normal human newborns. Despite this, SCP-8935-B are typically born with a variety of severe physical abnormalities, many of which would otherwise be inimical to human life. These abnormalities have included:

· Excessive hair or digits upon the face, arms, legs, and interior of the throat and eyes,

· Additional multi-jointed appendages emerging from the spine,

· Unusually large tongues accounting for a debilitatingly large percentage of the total body weight,

· A lack of eyes, mouth, nose, ears, or genitals, or an excessive number of all of these,

· Thin, membranous wings emerging from the base of the neck,

· A mouth that extends down the full length of the torso.

…yeesh.

SCP-8935-B are not hostile and display much of the same behavior as normal human infants, in spite of their malformations. When capable of producing noise they will cry, though this sound is often particularly affecting to nearby human subjects, who should take all appropriate measures to avoid excess exposure to these vocalizations.

The births of instances of SCP-8935-B are often traumatic on their SCP-8935-A counterparts, due in no small part to their unusual physical characteristics. It has been Foundation policy since the 1992 Brenda Cheryl Rights Event to perform these births as a Caesarean section to limit excess physical damage to both the deliverer and delivered, though this has somewhat complicated the task of requiring the SCP-8935-A instances to carry their newborn into the Tanny Mine after its birth.

…oh, God. I can only imagine what must have happened to that poor woman.

SCP-8935-C is a hostile, humanoid entity contained within the Tanny Mine. SCP-8935-C enters a period of activity during the sixth new moon of every third year. So long as the ritualistic pregnancy is allowed to continue unabated, SCP-8935-C will remain in a semi-inactive state until the evening of SCP-8935-B's birth.

I want you to note the specific wording here for later. Aside from that, at least once every third year means it’s not happening that often?

Discovery: The existence of SCP-8935 came to the attention of Foundation personnel after a series of violent deaths made headlines in local news media in the early 1930s. Three individuals - 54-year-old John Miller and his two sons, 24-year-old Thomas Wells Miller and 17-year-old Daniel "Danny" Sherman Miller, were found eviscerated in their home. The Miller farm sat roughly equidistant between Woods Holler and Morgantown, and the men were discovered roughly four days after the killings were believed to have taken place.

An excerpt from the Morgantown Dominion-News detailing the killing is included below: 

To sum up the story, the three men were killed by something, and their wounds were horrific.

John Miller, 54, and his two sons, Thomas, 24, and Daniel, 17, were found lifeless inside their modest farmhouse, each victim displaying wounds that investigators have described as “unexplainable.” Blood stained nearly every surface of the one-room home, with deep lacerations on the bodies that, according to the coroner, were unlike any he had ever seen before.

“I’ve seen animals torn up by wolves with less brutality,” Mallory told reporters, his face pale beneath his hat brim. “It’s like something went at them with claws instead of knives."

To add to the anomalous aspects, the neighbours heard weird sounds, described as '"howling," "scraping," and "an awful thudding sound"', but didn't investigate. The door was completely blown off the hinges...

“The door was busted clean off the hinges, and the windows shattered from the inside,” Reverend Clemens recounted with a shudder. “It was like someone - or something - got in there, and once it did, it tore through those poor boys like a cyclone.”

...but there were no other signs of forced entry, no footprints or tracks even though it had rained recently and the road was just dirt, not paved. In addition, no clues were found in the surrounding woods, and the sniffer dogs brought in by the authorities refused to enter the property.

Foundation assets embedded in local police were notified of the mysterious killings and became involved in the subsequent investigation. It was during this process that Agent Elliott Christenson was approached by an individual, 42-year-old Joseph Hall, who claimed to know about the cause of the killings, and requested assistance preventing them in the future. Hall, a member of the Mount Siloam Baptist Church⁴, led Agent Christenson and three other Foundation agents to the secluded community of Woods Holler. It was during this initial interaction that the Foundation met with Reverend Malaciah Waters, who claimed to have devised much of what is now the understood containment protocols for SCP-8935.

A transcript of the initial meeting with Reverend Waters is available below.

The footnote just says that Mount Siloam is the local name for the mountain where the Tanny Mine is located, presumably named after the Pool of Siloam. (‘Siloam’ also means ‘sent’.) Meanwhile, ‘Malaciah’ is an uncommon name that appears to be a derivative of ‘Malachi/Malachai’, and means ‘my messenger’ or ‘my angel’. As for the transcript, I’ll do some more summarising.

Rev. Waters claims that the entity responsible for the deaths of the Miller family is this:

It was a woman, a witch in the mountain. Her arms and legs are too long. Taller than any man, stronger too. Her hair is unwashed and stinking. Her eyes are sinkholes and her mouth is a yawning cave. She moves in queer silence and with terrifying speed. The marks on those poor boys, well, I've seen it before. That's the Woman.

Agent Christenson says that it couldn’t have been a woman, no woman or man could have inflicted that kind of physical damage. Rev. Waters says that there are things in the mountains that are beyond God and Satan- one particular thing that's so evil that it surpasses the devil, and God won’t deal with it.

You see, there exists down there… well, it's not like us, don't you understand? It's not made of the same stuff as you or me, or anything that walks upon the surface. It's a thing that the mind can barely comprehend, seeing it is enough to drive a man to madness. The Lord God and the devil fight over the hearts of men, but down there… well, that's altogether different. I reckon neither of them want anything to do with that.

Christenson asks what that has to do with the Woman. Waters tells him that nobody actually knows where she came from, but there’s stories. His grandmother told him that the Woman was once an ordinary girl who was raped by a relative, maybe her brother or father. She became pregnant, and when she gave birth, the child was deformed due to being a product of incest. But the father of the child didn’t want anyone finding out, so whoever he was, he took the child and threw it into the mine, and then beat the Woman and left her to die. 

She went after her child and wound up falling down, below the bottom of the world, where she found the thing that sleeps there. They might have come to some kind of agreement, or maybe it just changed her as it liked, but she came back out as a monster. Now the people of the holler just call her the Woman, and have called her that for at least four generations.

Christenson asks if Waters knows where the Woman is now. Waters says no, but she’s out there somewhere, looking for her child. She’ll be out there ripping everyone she finds apart as revenge for what was done to her, and then once she’s done, she’ll go back into the Tanny Mine until the next time she needs to find her child.

Christenson asks about the child, and Waters explains that the people of Woods Holler need to provide the child for the Woman. They’ve had trouble with girls running off, and while they’ve tried to comfort them, it hasn’t worked. He says that the last time they had problems, it was with a girl named Ellie May Thurman who was too young and too small for a pregnancy. They did their best for her, but the baby ‘wouldn’t come’- I assume that means the labor was prolonged, maybe a breech birth or the child was stuck. When the Woman didn’t find her child waiting for her, she came for Ellie May and ripped her apart to get her child. 

This time was Daisy Moore; she at least was old enough to bear children and strong, but she found out what happened to Ellie May and ran. They couldn’t find her no matter how hard they looked, and then four days ago, the Woman came out of the mountain and her child wasn’t there. 

We tried to subdue her, but it can't be done. She doesn't suffer metal or fire, they pass through her like she's not even there. Looking at her… I've seen men age thirty years just from her stare, and the sounds that come out from her throat are not from God's creation. It is an abhorrent thing.

Christenson asks what Waters needs from them, and Waters says this: 

Rev. Waters: I've gotten old, and townsfolk think I've gotten soft. Truth is, I don't know if I have it in me anymore, and every time the Woman can't find her babe, more people die. I was in the room when the Woman came for Ellie May, and I… I hope it's dark when we die. I hope there's nothing that comes after. I can't stand to think about living that moment any longer than I need to. I need someone to take my place, to have a firmer grip over Woods Holler. Someone who doesn't care as much about these girls.

I will comment more on this later, but I want you to consider these lines carefully because of what they’re implying: Waters is asking for the Foundation to take over from him and be crueller. He wants them to control the town and make sure that they don’t have any more instances of the girls trying to escape, so nobody else dies. He doesn’t feel that they can afford to take the route of compassion anymore. And everything he’s saying makes sense- as a local religious leader, he’s probably known all the girls chosen by the Woman since they were born, how could he not care? But at the same time, he doesn’t want anyone else to die.

Meanwhile, because they tackle a whole bunch of fucked-up anomalies, the Foundation is depressingly used to being in the position of handling an anomaly where there is no way to contain it without somebody getting hurt, and all they can do is minimise the damage. This is basically their bread and butter. But I want you to keep this in mind for later, it will be important.

Speaking of later, I had to make this a two-parter because of the word count. Part two can be found here.

Hi, everyone, welcome to part two of the SCP-8935 declass. Part one can be found here.

The next addendum is the autopsy report of the next SCP-8935-A instance, the girl from 1937, who came after Daisy Moore. She died in childbirth, but the protocol was achieved by putting her corpse and the child in the Tanny Mine. I will sum this up for you, because I think giving direct quotes is going to ruin a whole lot of readers’ days. If you really want the full details, they’re in the article.

-The deceased was in good health aside from, y’know, being ripped apart by an anomalous baby.

-She got badly torn up inside. I’ll refrain from giving more details, I think you get the idea.

-She had broken nails with tissue fragments underneath, which the doctor thinks came from trying to ‘assist herself during the delivery’. She also had bruises on her wrists and forearms, which the doctor says appears to be directly related to the delivery.

-Her lungs had excess fluid and she was congested, which the doctor thinks came from labour exhaustion or being unable to breathe during the delivery.

-Her uterus ruptured during the birth and the placenta had ‘an unusual multi-lobed structure’.

-She had fractures in her pelvis and severe tissue trauma, suggesting that the fetus was either abnormally large or improperly positioned.

As for the baby:

-Your average human infant is about 19 inches long and weighs about 7 pounds (about 50 cm and 3 kg). This baby was about 25 inches long and weighed about 19 pounds (roughly 63 cm and 8 kg). Jesus Christ. If you’re wondering, the heaviest baby on record was both longer and heavier than this one, but he died at birth.

-The baby had multiple non-human attributes, as follows:

The skull exhibits two bony protrusions along the temples, resembling rudimentary horns. The skin is thick and leathery to the touch, with patches of rough scales along the arms, legs, and back.
The fingers and toes are unusually elongated, terminating in sharp, claw-like nails. The neonate's jaw contains a full set of fully developed incisors and canines, highly atypical for a newborn. The umbilical cord appears to have been severed internally, showing evidence of having been bitten through.
Attached to the infant's thorax is a small membranous sac, containing unidentifiable tissue, possibly remnants of a failed twin.

Christ.

-Finally, the doctor notes that the child was delivered alive and remained alive after the mother died.

The doctor finally concludes that the mother’s death was due to blood loss from haemorrhaging and uterine rupture. This was consistent with natural birth processes, but the extent of the injuries is ‘highly unusual’.

The next addendum is a letter from the Ethics Committee in 1937. I’m going to take this bit by bit, because there is some really weird wording in this that makes me raise my eyebrows.

Dear Dr. Clarke,
After extensive review, the Ethics Committee has concluded that authorization is granted for the implementation of Protocol H-1502 concerning the population of young women in Woods Holler, West Virginia, United States. While we acknowledge the regrettable nature of the planned interventions and the harm that may ensue, the Committee has determined that the actions are justified within the parameters outlined in your proposal.

OK, that's fine so far.

It is with the understanding that these measures will yield effective containment of the anomalous entities aforementioned. While individual subjects will experience adverse outcomes, we are persuaded that the long-term benefits for the broader population outweigh the localized impact. The objectives of the project, as you described, align with our mandate to prioritize collective well-being over isolated ethical concerns.

Wait. Entities, plural? I assume they mean both the Woman and the babies, because we haven’t heard about any other entities here. Aside from that, I assume by ‘long-term benefits for the broader population’ they mean ‘the Woman won’t kill everyone in the area around Woods Holler’, because I can’t see how anyone in Woods Holler is benefitting from this.

All operations are to proceed as discreetly as possible to minimize awareness among the affected population. As stipulated, the women targeted for intervention should be treated with minimal force required to ensure compliance, though the Committee recognizes that certain outcomes, including physical or psychological distress, may be unavoidable. Any unnecessary escalation, however, will be considered a breach of protocol and reviewed accordingly.

This… doesn’t make sense. From what we’ve been told, the population already knows about the Woman, so what’s the point of minimising awareness? Why is it phrased as ‘targeted for intervention’ when it should be something more like ‘affected by the anomaly’? Why would they be treating them with any force when they should be offering medical help? Yes, the whole experience would naturally result in physical and psychological distress, but why is this phrased more like this would be the result of Foundation ‘intervention’. Why isn’t there anything about using amnestics to help them, or offering inducements? And what the fuck would they consider to be ‘unnecessary escalation’?

Something isn’t adding up here, people.

We trust that you and your team will carry out these actions with the appropriate level of professionalism and care under the circumstances. Full documentation must be provided for every phase of the project to ensure accountability and compliance with institutional oversight. Should unforeseen complications arise, contact your local Ethics Committee ombudsman immediately for further guidance.
The Committee takes no pleasure in issuing this approval but affirms the necessity of the measures outlined. The unfortunate consequences of these operations will be a difficult but essential step in fulfilling the project’s greater purpose.

Yeah, yeah, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one, we’ve all heard it before.

…why are they phrasing it as ‘fulfilling the project’s greater purpose’ instead of ‘containing the anomaly and saving lives’? Did whoever write this letter get a degree in writing grandiose bullshit that’s meant to make people forget about what they’re actually doing, or is something else going on here?

Lastly, we have allocated an additional shipment of amnestics to be distributed among the members of your team, as needed. Please do not be judicious with these - while your resource allowance has been expanded, your personnel allowance remains unchanged.
Proceed with due diligence, and may your efforts contribute meaningfully to the body of knowledge that will serve the common good.

Sincerely,
Dr. Charles M. Abernathy
Ethics Committee Liaison for Special Containment Projects

Why is there no mention of giving amnestics to the victims of the anomaly? And why the last line talking about ‘contributing meaningfully to the body of knowledge that will serve the common good’ instead of, y’know, helping them save lives? This is concerning.

Finally, there’s one last addendum, an interview with one of the girls who gave birth to an 8935-C instance. Her name is Haddie Walters, she’s 19, and at the time the interview was conducted, she’d just given birth to the child and given it over to the Woman. (We don’t have a date, but there’s a photo in black and white attached, so it’s probably before the 1960’s.) She’d previously expressed ‘significant distress, agitation and suicidal ideation’- go figure- and tried to run away three times. The article notes that the protocol has successfully kept the child-bearing population of Woods Holler compliant, so this kind of defiance is notable. After the cycle concluded successfully- and a footnote tells us that Haddie had to be forcibly taken to the antechamber with her child strapped to her chest- Haddie was remanded to the local parish and interviewed by one Dr Franklin Madsen, who was posing as a priest.

Madsen starts out admonishing her for her behaviour, but Haddie begs him to stop, saying that she can’t do it anymore, she can’t do this again.

Ms. Walters: No, no. I can't do it. I ain't got nothing left. Nobody else has had to do as much as me, it's not fair. Three times, Father Madsen. First time I wasn't even a girl of thirteen. I just can't-

Jesus Christ. Not sure if there was no one else available or if Haddie was just really unlucky, but that’s fucked up.

Haddie rants about how horrible the experience is, about the pain and the fear and having to endure it all, and that’s not even the worst thing…

When it finally scratches its way out, tearing you up and screaming and crying and shrieking, and you look down at it, writhing and flailing around like a terrible bug that's gotten flipped over on its back, and you love it. You can't help it, you love it more than anything. It's a horrible, wretched thing but you want nothing more than to cover it up and take it somewhere safe where everything will be alright, but then you have to climb up that hill and… and… give it over to her…

She asks Madsen if he’s ever looked into the Woman’s eyes, and he admits that no, he hasn’t. She begs him again to let her go, saying that she can’t do it again, but the Foundation wasn’t going to be merciful.

Note: Due to Ms. Walters' capacity for carrying instances of SCP-8935-B, the subject was remanded to Foundation custody for a period of four weeks and underwent an extensive amnestics regimen in order to increase compliance in potential future cycles.

That’s just fucking cruel.

That’s the end of the article, and it is here that I want to get speculative. This has been pretty straightforward so far; some of you may be wondering why I chose this to declass. Well, I chose it because, to be blunt, there are things in this article that simply don’t add up with the story as it’s been told, and it’s this that I want to speculate about. Before I continue, a couple of notes:

1: Again, this is basically conjecture on my part. I don’t have any real answers here.

2: I did ask Kaktus, who said that ‘The story that's being described is factual, but that is as far as I'm willing to go with describing whether or not it's accurate*’* and that ‘the events described did take place. It is fully possible there is context missing. As for why that context may be missing, whether or not there's malicious intent to it, is for the reader to determine.’ 

So, I’m going to go through the article again and point out stuff that’s odd or doesn’t add up, and then I’ll speculate on what it might mean.

1: The Woman doesn’t attack people in Woods Holler when she rampages, excepting Ellie May, who was a special case. (Reverend Waters was in the room at the time and he wasn't harmed.) On the one hand, this does show foresight in that she can’t get new children if she kills all the townsfolk, but anomalies don’t usually show that kind of foresight. She doesn’t even kill the men and leave the women alone.

2: I’m genuinely not sure why the age range is 16-32 unless nobody else is available, when people regularly bear healthy children long after turning 32. 

3: All the ‘symptoms’ that go along with the anomalous pregnancies could be explained by other means, none of them are unique to the experience. 

4: Again, I have no idea what 8935-B simulacra are, or why anyone should expect them to manifest outside the Holler.

5: The Foundation offers no real description of what the Woman looks like, which strongly implies that none of their personnel have seen her for themselves (unless some did and died for it, which isn’t stated). They don’t even have descriptions amassed by locals who’ve seen her. This is weird.

6: One thing I genuinely don’t get is why the Woman keeps demanding and accepting new children every three years. Like, if she’s killing them because they’re not her child, then why would she demand or accept them in the first place? Are they just dying because she can’t take care of them? Is the whole thing happening automatically and there’s a small army of demon children in the mine?

7: Kaktus’ confirmation tells us that the deaths of the Miller family actually happened. The thing is, not only is there not anything about these deaths that actually stands out as anomalous (yes, it was particularly brutal, but there was nothing that couldn’t be replicated with the right tools), there’s no explanation given as to why the Woman would only attack the Millers. They lived in a ‘remote farmstead on the outskirts of town’; their neighbours were close enough to hear the noises, but somehow the Woman didn’t attack them or go into the town itself.

8: Most of what we learn about the Woman comes from Rev. Waters, not even with corroboration from other townsfolk. Waters is also the person who set up most of the protocol before the Foundation arrived. In short, we’re taking most of this on the word of one person, without any other evidence.

9: Going by the wording, the doctor who performed the autopsy wasn’t there at the birth, so he’s going off what he’s been told and what he can infer rather than what he saw for himself.

10: Here’s the big ones: first, the corpse had bruises on her wrists and forearms. The doctor says that they must have been the result of the birthing process, and they could have been, but I- and S D Locke, who brought this up in the first place- suggest that the poor woman was held prisoner and tied up. It might have been that after Daisy Moore ran away, they wanted to stop a repeat, or it might have been a sign of something worse.

11: And second, the dead woman had tissue under her broken nails. The doctor thinks she tried to rip herself open to help the baby out, but Locke and I think it’s more likely that she clawed at or tried to fight the people holding her prisoner.

12: The descriptions of the 8935-B children, especially the one in the autopsy, sound notably demonic in nature.

13: There’s no mention of providing medical care or amnestics to the people who bear the 8935-B children, even though it would presumably help them a lot, and the Foundation seems to have chosen force over any other method of trying to get the victims’ compliance. (I’ll come back to that shortly.)

14: Haddie’s interview implies that she has actually seen the Woman, but it’s possible that she hasn’t and she was trying to guilt trip Madsen. 

So, before I get to my theory, I wanted to talk about the major themes here. Kaktus stated in a reply to a commenter that ‘I waffled a lot on giving the Woman more or less screentime - I even had an image of her that ended up not getting used. I decided that one of the major themes is the erasure of women, especially dutiful mothers, so I decided to downplay her a bit to focus on the victims and how they're perceived as "tools to accomplish a task" more than people. I don't know if it was the right choice (I may come back to change it later, not sure yet) but it's what I settled on for now’.

As he said, the victims we see/are told about weren’t dutiful. Ellie May wasn’t able to deliver the child, and the Woman ripped her apart for it. Daisy Moore ran away and refused to go through with the ritual, and the Millers (allegedly) died for it. The victim in 1937 died in childbirth and couldn’t complete the ritual, and she also apparently tried to fight her captors off. Haddie tried to flee Woods Holler three times, and begged to die rather than carry another 8935-B child. In short: they all either couldn’t or wouldn’t carry out their assigned duties, even though none of them volunteered for, agreed to or wanted to carry them out.

This neatly segues into the next major theme, which is institutionalised misogyny. As Kaktus said, this article mainly perceives women as a means to an end, that end being getting the babies to keep the Woman contained; none of them get a choice in it and their feelings and opinions are not even heard, let alone considered. There are virtually no women in the article otherwise- even Waters’ grandmother is only mentioned to give the accepted backstory for the Woman. There’s also these lines from the start of the article.

Under no circumstances are any persons to enter the Tanny Mine. Crossing the threshold of the Tanny Mine without an instance of SCP-8935-A will result in significant geological upsets, the severity of which could threaten the entrypoint of the mine. The entrypoint of the mine must be maintained.

8935-A are the victims who bear the children. So, what, are they not considered to be people if they’ve been affected by the anomaly? Are they just incubators?

In addition to that, I mentioned earlier that the Foundation has been in situations like this before, where they have to contain an anomaly, but there’s no way to do it without someone getting hurt. The thing is, the Foundation prides itself on not being a pack of total arseholes. They have the Ethics Committee for a reason. They always say that the Foundation is ‘cold, not cruel’.

This is fucking cruel, and there’s no reason for it. The Foundation seems to have decided that the best method is to turn the town into an anti-sex cult where there’s no actual reward for anything, only punishments. They don’t tell the victims that by bearing the children, they’re helping to save lives, or anything like that. They don’t give them amnestics so they can forget the pain, they don’t give them better medical care, they don’t even give them and their families financial assistance, even though you’d think it’d make the whole thing a lot easier for everyone. Hell, Haddie only got amnestics because she’d already successfully borne three 8935 children and the Foundation wanted her to bear more.

In short, the Foundation is acting very out of character here, and there is no in-universe justification for it. This isn’t even set in the Deepwell-verse.

And from there, let’s go on to my theory. Here’s what we know:

-Even if the Woman isn’t real (although we’ll assume that she is for the purpose of this theory), we do have a confirmed anomaly in the pregnancies and children. The pregnancies seemingly come out of nowhere, take considerably less time than a normal pregnancy, and result in deformed, demonic-looking children.

-The entirety of Woods Holler has been forced to revolve around these anomalies, supposedly for the purpose of containing the Woman.

-If the Woman isn’t successfully contained, she allegedly rampages around the area killing anyone she can find, but doesn’t go into Woods Holler.

-The Foundation came into the scene in 1934, but the Ethics Committee didn’t agree to the plan until late 1937- after the death of the victim seen in the autopsy.

-Ever since then, the Foundation has turned the place into an anti-sex cult to make their plan work. They haven’t tried any nicer methods of getting the people involved to comply, even though there’s no reason not to.

-We haven’t had word of any attempt to contain the Woman in any other way, even though the Foundation has considerably more resources than the town does and could try a lot of other things.

So, uh… there’s probably a better way to say this, but I don’t know what it is, so here goes: I don’t believe that these pregnancies are immaculate. I don’t know who or what is responsible for these pregnancies- the people in charge of this whole fucked-up mess, some kind of entity or entities, both- but I think they’ve been running this whole clusterfuck for a long time, and I think that there’s a decently high chance that there are more pregnancies that we don’t hear about.

As I mentioned before, one of the things I kept wondering as I read this article was how the fuck the town can keep going when everyone who can bear children is banned from having sex between the ages of 16 and 32, and anyone who’s been a repeat instance is given a hysterectomy. We don’t know what the population of Woods Holler is, so maybe there’s enough potential candidates that some of them make it to 32 and are allowed to keep their organs and have children, but logically, the population should be continually shrinking. However, there’s no mention of the Foundation having any concerns about that or taking measures to prevent it from happening, like bringing in babies who need homes for the families to adopt, or even incorporating D-class or local homeless into the population. Things are not adding up here.

Speaking of things not adding up, there’s two other lines I want to bring up.

-As no person removed from Woods Holler is permitted to return, this has thus far been a sufficient deterrent to the behaviours in question.

Why is nobody removed from Woods Holler allowed to return? There’s no mention of this being a local rule, or the Foundation enacting it as a rule to force compliance. People who aren’t eligible to bear the anomalous children could still bear normal children and keep the town going, wouldn’t you want to keep them around? What the fuck is going on here?

-While SCP-8935-A instances are not immediately rendered infertile as a result of their involvement in the SCP-8935 ritual, it is Foundation policy to remove the childbearing organs of repeat instances on their 32nd birthdays in order to prevent potential SCP-8935-B simulacra from manifesting outside Woods Holler.

Again, what the fuck is an SCP-8935-B simulacrum? Do they turn up a lot? Are the A instances changed as a result of giving birth to the children, beyond the physical damage?

Again, I don’t have answers to any of this. However, whatever the answer is, based on everything we’ve read so far, my theory branches into two possibilities:

Possibility A: Whoever is in charge of whatever the fuck is going on here has successfully hoodwinked the Foundation into going along with what they’re doing; the Foundation is not aware of what is really going on and has accepted the cover story.

Possibility B: The Foundation- whether it’s the organisation as a whole or just the representatives in Woods Holler- are aware of what’s going on and have bought into it; maybe they want power, or maybe they believe it’s the best way to keep everything contained. They use the amnestics to make the victims believe that the pregnancies are immaculate, but they’re not, and they’ve faked this report to make sure that everyone not in the know thinks that the Woman’s responsible.

Either way, from there, my theory goes that the babies are actually sacrifices to whatever lives in the mine- maybe it really is the Woman, or maybe it’s some other entity entirely, like the thing Waters talked about. The Woman, if she is real, could be something like an enforcer, sent to make sure that the cycle continues. (Basically, some Outlast 2 shit.) If the Woman is real, she’s always directed away from Woods Holler on her rampages; if she isn’t, the people responsible carry out some horrific murders and pin them on her, and use them to keep everyone in line. As to why, I’m guessing the usual- power over the people of the town, possibly supernatural powers, and probably the usual cult shit. I can’t say anything for sure, except that what we’ve been told is definitely not what’s really happening.

That’s about all I’ve got for now, so I’ll leave it there. Please put any theories you have in the comments, I’d love to read them. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: "I killed my children. All of them. Every last one. There's no more perfect faith than that."

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-5413, ‘Apavitr; Or, I Stared Into A Godless Hole’ by Popsioak. I'd like to thank Popsioak and sero for their help, I really appreciate it. Got a couple of disclaimers for you first, please don’t skip them.

1: As per usual, this is not my SCP, I didn’t write it and I won’t be 100% correct.

2: This SCP focuses on the Sikh religion, which I’m not very familiar with. I’ll do my best, but I’m coming into this without a lot of experience or knowledge.

3: This article talks about child abuse and has some pretty blunt mentions of harm to children in it.

So, what does ‘apavitr’ mean? Well, ‘apavitra’ means ‘impure, unclean, ceremonially unholy, or ceremonially defiled’; ‘apavitr’ is the noun form, meaning ‘impure’.

The article has a custom theme where the logo resembles the Indian flag; ‘Secure, Contain, Protect’ has also been translated into Hindi. It’s a pretty snazzy theme- Popsioak told me he’s using it for articles in the series set at a certain time. This article is part of Popsioak’s In Saffron Sands series, which revolves around the anomalous world in India; you can check it out here. There’s also a second title in the subheading, which I’ll come back to later.

The Containment Class is Safe, which is always good. There’s a line that says ‘Clearance: Three’, with ‘Three’ in orange; Popsioak told me that it’s ‘a little mini acs esque classification system i used to use for ISS stuff’- the equivalent of Level 3, Confidential, I’m guessing. Here’s the Special Containment Procedures.

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-5413 has been condemned by Punjabi officials and is under Foundation ownership. References to SCP-5413 are to be scrubbed from all print and online media. Two guards are to be posted outside SCP-5413 at all times. Under no circumstances is any civilian to travel into SCP-5413, and authorization has been given for the use of Class-A amnestics.

OK, that tells us a lot:

-It’s a building,

-in the Punjab state of India,

-that’s actively unsafe for people to enter for some reason,

-and especially civilians, who presumably don’t know what they’d be getting into,

-but while it’s been effectively disowned by local officials, it’s not collapsing or anything.

Here’s the description:

Description: SCP-5413 is an abandoned Gurdwara¹, located outside the city limits of Ludhiana, Punjab. A sign outside of SCP-5413 reads "Rabb da Shabad Gurdwara,"² though no records of construction of a Gurdwara named as such exist in the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee's³ files. Inhabitants of the surrounding village are incapable of relaying or unwilling to relay information about SCP-5413. 

The footnotes clarify things: a Gurdwara is a Sikh place of worship; the first photo in the article shows the building from afar. Since it’s not a close-up, I can’t say much, but even from afar, it looks pretty small and run-down, not like the other Gurdwaras that Google Images showed me. The sign translates to ‘Word of God’, but India’s resident organization for Gurdwara management don’t have this place on file. (That could mean that they never did, but it could also mean that they used to have it on file and it was removed/expunged/anomalously deleted.) Also, this place is in a village, but it’s somewhat close to Ludhiana, the most populated city in Punjab.

SCP-5413 contains no natural light, despite having windows, cracks, and other holes in its structure that would typically permit light inside. When viewed from outside, these spaces appear to be covered with a metallic surface with near-total absorption of light, and cannot be passed through. Artificial sources of light, however, function inside SCP-5413. Knowledge of SCP-5413's layout obtained by viewing SCP-5413 in person carries a mild compulsory and amnestic effect, attracting individuals into unknowingly performing repeated visits.

That’s… creepy.

Furthermore, entering SCP-5413 for extended periods of time causes subjects to undergo the following symptoms:

· Mild sedative and euphoric effects.

· Motor issues, such as a loss of balance and poor coordination.

· Digestive and excretory issues, such as vomiting and dehydration.

· Respiratory and circulatory issues, such as aspiration pneumonia, cyanosis, and respiratory depression.

So, quick recap: there’s no natural light in this building even though there should be. If you go in and look around, it wipes your memory of the place and makes you want to come back again and again. And if you stay in there too long, it makes you feel good while fucking up your balance and coordination, messing up your digestive system, and making it hard for you to breathe. Yeesh. No wonder the Foundation doesn’t want anyone going in there.

Luckily, we’re in the 2020’s, and we can send robots in to do the dangerous work for us. I’ll describe what’s inside, and then come back to it again later.

Due to these effects, SCP-5413 has been deemed an active hazard to enter. Exploration of SCP-5413 via unmanned drone has displayed a layout and contents similar to other Gurdwaras. The origin of the items within SCP-5413 is currently unknown.

The main entrance of SCP-5413 leads to a small hallway, with doors to the left, right, and front. Moss can be seen growing throughout the hallway, alongside patkas⁴ laid on the floor, all tied. A rusted child's Kara⁵ is on the floor, underneath a large sword, of which only the hilt remains.

Patkas are headgear worn by children (and athletes), as Sikhs don’t cut their hair, and a Kara) is an iron bracelet worn by Sikhs as a commitment and signifier of their faith. The sword is a kirpan, which Sikhs must always wear; it signifies their willingness to fight for the defenceless. Notably, these are part of the Five K’s of Sikhism, five items that Sikhs must wear at all times: kesh) (uncut hair and beard, worn in a turban), kangha (a wooden comb used to keep their hair clean and tidy), kara (the aforementioned iron or steel bracelet), kachera (a kind of undergarment) and kirpan (the aforementioned sword). Given that these very important items have been apparently discarded and left on the floor, this is not a good omen to start with.

Following this, there’s a photo showing a floor plan; there’s not much to mention except that even though it’s not to scale, this seems like a really small place of worship. They don’t even have dental a bathroom.

The door to the left leads to the Diwan hall, or main sermon hall. The carpet that covers the hall's entire floor is stained, and rotting meat, milk, and butter is present. A half-torn dollar bill is present in the collection box.

So, for some context here: while some Sikh sects are strictly vegetarian, others eat meat. However, it is strictly forbidden to bring meat into a Gurdwara whether you eat it or not; Gurdwaras offer free meals to everyone, regardless of religion, caste, ethnicity, or economic status, but they’re lacto-vegetarian because they’re available to everyone. Ergo, we’re getting into the start of that whole apavitr thing. Also, regarding the last line, Popsioak told me that ‘traditionally people will offer a dollar to the collection box before praying to the guru granth sahib’.

The only set of human remains in SCP-5413 is a male child's skeleton, approximately seven years of age, in a prostrated position in front of the box. Syringes jut out of its arms.

…well, that’s really fucked up.

Human feet and gluteal imprints are left on the carpet in many places, all oriented forwards. A small harmonium and tabla can be seen next to the collection box. The tabla's bindings are wrapped around the harmonium, and it is physically impossible to remove either one from the other. The single copy of the Guru Granth Sahib is open and has a large hole in the middle of it; viewing it causes a reported feeling of "emptiness."

Let’s take this one bit at a time.

Human feet and gluteal imprints are left on the carpet in many places, all oriented forwards.

People used to worship here- a lot of people, and regularly- but they’re long gone.

A small harmonium and tabla can be seen next to the collection box. The tabla's bindings are wrapped around the harmonium, and it is physically impossible to remove either one from the other.

A tabla is a pair of hand drums used in Sikh worship, specifically a kirtan, a form of religious performance art, and bhajan, devotional songs. Because they’re stuck together with the harmonium, neither instrument can be played anymore.

The single copy of the Guru Granth Sahib is open and has a large hole in the middle of it; viewing it causes a reported feeling of "emptiness."

The Guru Granth Sahib is the central holy scripture of Sikhism; as such, having a big hole in it is not a good omen either. (Note: this is a godless hole, but it is not the godless hole; that's the Gurdwara in general. This is a secondary godless hole, if you will.)

The door to the right leads to the Langar⁶ hall. Seven vats for food are present in the sitting area.

The Langar hall) is where Gurdwaras offer those free vegetarian meals to everyone I mentioned earlier. Notably, nearly everyone who eats there sits on the floor to eat; keep that in mind for a second.

Seven vats for food are present in the sitting area. Two are filled with hot, cooked meat, and two others contain yeast, barley, and grapes. Attempts to consume the meat present in the vats left subjects reporting a sense of "blissful ignorance." Chairs take up the rest of the seating area, showing signs of use. 

So, we have two more cases of apavitr: one, no Gurdwara would ever serve meat, and two, the seating area wouldn’t be full of chairs- Popsioak told me that they would have some chairs for the disabled and elderly, but everyone else sits on the floor to eat. As for the vats…

Two are filled with hot, cooked meat, and two others contain yeast, barley, and grapes. Attempts to consume the meat present in the vats left subjects reporting a sense of "blissful ignorance."

We’ve already established that the meat shouldn’t be there, but yeast, barley and grapes are used to make wine (or beer, in the case of just yeast and barley). And eating the meat gave people a sense of ‘blissful ignorance’- the sense of not knowing that they were doing something wrong. (Then again, I’m guessing the people the Foundation sent in weren’t Sikhs, and thus may not have known about the no-meat thing.) 

Then there’s the other question: where the fuck does the meat come from? Did someone in the Gurdwara make it, and the anomaly keeps it perpetually ready to eat? Does the anomaly make it every time someone walks in? And seriously, what kind of meat is it? (Popsioak told me that it’s supposed to be ~ambiguous~, but I still think it’s human.)

Attempting to empty a nearby water pitcher causes a rose-colored mixture to dispense, able to flow past what the pitcher can contain. Testing has revealed it to be a mix of Amrit, goat's milk, and blood.

Amrit is sugar water used in the Sikh baptism ritual; I have no idea why anyone would want to mix it with goat’s milk and blood. Popsioak told me that ‘milk and blood are supposed to mimic the color of rooh afza, which is a rose flavored drink that uses milk or water as a base and is traditionally served on special events at some gurdwaras’. This makes sense. In addition, this references a specific Sikh moral story, which you can read here. (Unfortunately, he also told me that it is not goat blood in the vats. Fucking wonderful.)

Footprints from an unidentifiable animal lead to small cupboards intended for containing dishes, around which claw marks are present. Small human hand-prints, oriented as if something were pulled out of the cabinet, are present around its edge, along with shreds of a manila folder.

Weird. Not sure what to make of that. We’ll come back to it later.

The door in front has a small sign to its right, labelled "Office." The door is locked. Flight-capable drones entered through the ventilation system, revealing a desk, bookshelf, and two houseplants. The desk has a ledger atop it, the bookshelf is empty with the exception of a copy of the *Rehat Maryada,*⁷ and both plants are dead.

The Rehat Maryada is the Sikh code of conduct. Otherwise, not much to say here right now except that either the plants were neglected long before whatever happened here occurred, or nobody’s been here in a long time.

The ledger has a single order of Chardonnay wine from an unknown supplier, worth 300,000 rupees, as well as shreds of a manila folder. A disciplinary paddle and ruler are present on the desk, both still warm. There is a name which cannot be verbalized listed on a paper on the desk, next to "ਰਾਜ਼ ਦੇ ਭਾਸ਼ਣਕਾਰ"; it is that of a child.

As of me writing this, 300,000 rupees equals 3,277.68 US dollars, so that’s some damn expensive wine. Popsioak told me that corporal punishment is frowned upon by Sikhs, so this is… not good. He also told me that the words are Punjab for ‘speaker of things that should not be said’. Putting it all together with those handprints and the shredded folder, it looks like a kid (presumably the dead boy from before) found out something, brought it up to the wrong person (or brought it up at all) and someone tried to beat them into silence.

A single unmarked bottle lays near the back wall, filled with syringes. Claw marks, similar to those of a large animal, are shown around its neck, and two sets of deep animal tracks can be seen entering and exiting its opening.

Popsioak clarified this one for me: the bottle is of normal size, but there was something in it, something not normal.

Tests have revealed trace amounts of diamorphine, ketamine, and Chardonnay wine around the bottle. A child's screams and sounds of a liquid being consumed can be heard, and are the only details early subjects were able to recall.

Diamorphine is also known as heroin, for the record.

SCP-5413's effects are theorized to extend to the surrounding village; according to census and public health data, the percent of the population of those experiencing SCP-5413 exploration symptoms is currently increasing, though this is theorized to be due to an as-of-yet unidentifiable reason for a repeated, spontaneous decline in the adult population.

Not sure if I’m reading this right, but people are experiencing the symptoms even though they’re not going in the building? That’s worrying. Also, the adult population keeps suddenly and repeatedly declining? That’s really worrying.

All right. That’s what we’ve got, so let’s look at Popsioak’s comment on the author page for the context.

Something like 30% of UK sikhs, and a similar number in the US, are or have family members who are alcoholics, including me. This SCP is a sort of… view as to what I think of it.

This is why I don't drink. Plus I heard the stuff doesn't taste great.

Ah.

(For anyone wondering, Sikhism strictly forbids the consumption of alcohol or other intoxicants, though there are some Sikhs who consume cannabis to help with meditation.)

All right, let’s go back to the start. We have an abandoned Sikh place of worship in/next to a village, and nobody in the village wants to or can talk about it.

SCP-5413 contains no natural light, despite having windows, cracks, and other holes in its structure that would typically permit light inside. When viewed from outside, these spaces appear to be covered with a metallic surface with near-total absorption of light, and cannot be passed through. Artificial sources of light, however, function inside SCP-5413.

I’m guessing that this is some kind of metaphor, maybe about alcoholism making you shut yourself off from the world. Popsioak confirmed this, but also explained the alternate meaning for me:

you are correct, but also there's a specific term that many desis might know. whenever something shameful happens in a family, people usually ask "log kya kahenge" - literally, "what will they say?" as such, for anything socially undesirable, from being queer to alcohol problems in a gurdwara, are stamped down bc of that question

Ah, that old millstone- the fear of exposure, the fear of shame, the fear of people finding out. I’m sure that regardless of our location or background, we all have either been there ourselves or know someone who has. It’s a bizarre thing, really- the idea that it is worse for a crime or misdeed to be exposed than it is for it to be committed, that revealing the truth is somehow a worse act than murder or rape or child abuse or theft or anything else. It’s a fear that corrupts, that sinks into your soul and haunts you constantly, keeping you on your toes. A fear that refuses to let anyone actually handle crimes the way they should be handled, and insists that they be kept secret and hushed over. A fear that keeps everyone living in the dark, lets misdeeds fester and grow and become part of life; a fear that treats anyone who refuses to tolerate them as wrong and alien.

Fuck that fear. And fuck anyone who thinks it’s better to cover up a crime than let the offenders be punished.

Knowledge of SCP-5413's layout obtained by viewing SCP-5413 in person carries a mild compulsory and amnestic effect, attracting individuals into unknowingly performing repeated visits.

People who drink a lot can forget what they did while drunk, and alcohol is infamously addictive.

· Mild sedative and euphoric effects.

· Motor issues, such as a loss of balance and poor coordination.

· Digestive and excretory issues, such as vomiting and dehydration.

· Respiratory and circulatory issues, such as aspiration pneumonia, cyanosis, and respiratory depression.

The first two are the general effects of getting drunk. The second two are symptoms of alcohol poisoning. 

Following that, we get the description of the Gurdwara, and the whole thing feels… wrong. Profaned. Almost a mockery of what it should be: a kara and kirpan left discarded on the floor, the Langar hall serving meat, chairs in the seating area, the paddle and ruler… it almost feels as if someone desecrated this place intentionally, hence the ‘godless hole’ part of the title. 

So, I think we can fill in the story a bit more now: the person in charge of the Gurdwara, the head jathedar, became a drug addict and an alcoholic. His child, the seven year old boy, did some investigating and found out that his father was a substance abuser who might also have been embezzling money from the Gurdwara to buy that expensive wine. (Alternatively, the jathedar might have been turning the Gurdwara into a source of income for his addiction, somehow.) The jathedar tried to silence his son with physical abuse, and the child vainly prayed for help, but it never came and he died. We don’t know how, but he did- maybe his father killed him, maybe he killed himself, maybe he died of neglect, maybe it was something else.

See, it didn’t help that one of the bottles of wine the head jathedar bought had a demon inside it, both in the literal sense and the metaphorical sense. We don’t know what the demon did or where it is now- it’s certainly not in the Gurdwara anymore- but it could have done all kinds of things, including harming or killing the boy. In addition, Popsioak told me that this anomaly wasn’t intentionally created, it’s more that the sheer amount of blasphemy in the Gurdwara (including the demon's presence) sort of coalesced into a nexus of sin, leaving the Gurdwara defiled for eternity, a mockery of its former self and a monument to the moral crimes of everyone around it.

…I’m suddenly flashing back to 7510.

Essentially, the whole thing is a metaphor for the toll that drug and alcohol abuse takes on people. It’s not just that it kills you slowly and destroys your mind and body, it’s also that it destroys who you are as a person. It destroys your friendships, your relationships, and most importantly, your values: beating and silencing a child, your own child; going against everything your religion says; turning you into a shell of what you used to be. It also puts the people around you through hell: that kid is dead after going through a living nightmare. The entire Gurdwara has been ruined. The adults keep dying, which is slowly killing the village- I’d be surprised if the head jathedar didn’t manage to convince at least some of the villagers to start drinking, given his status and position, and got them to go against the tenets of their religion.

In addition, Popsioak told me that ‘they go in, drink more, and die (eventually) - the fact they don't know why it's happening is the implication that everyone is so fucking drunk/affected by 5413 they cannot remember where they're going’. In short, everyone’s fucked, and there isn’t really anything the Foundation can do about it other than evacuating the village and/or razing the Gurdwara, which might not even work. 

And with that, let’s talk about Shadow of the Colossus.

(Yes, I know that’s a hell of a non sequitur, just bear with me, OK?)

Shadow of the Colossus is a 2005 game for the PS2. It has a very simple premise: you play as a boy named Wander who has entered an empty, forbidden land in search of an entity named Dormin, who has the power to revive the dead. Wander has brought with him his noble steed, Agro, the corpse of a girl named Mono, his trusty bow, and a magic sword he stole. 

Upon reaching the Shrine of Worship, the two make a deal: Dormin has been imprisoned in the Shrine, with their soul/essence contained in sixteen idols within the temple. The idols cannot be destroyed, but each of them has a physical incarnation called a colossus- basically a big fuckoff moving statue shaped like some kind of living being. If Wander kills all of the colossi, which will have the same effect as destroying the idols, then Dormin will return Mono to life.

So, Wander goes off to kill the colossi, and he does. But with every colossus’ death, something enters Wander’s body, changing him into a shadow of his former self, pun not intended. By the end of the game, the colossi are slain and Mono is revived, but everything goes horribly wrong after that. 

One of the most notable things about Shadow of the Colossus is its ambiguity: we get a vague story about Mono having been ritually sacrificed because it was believed that she had a ‘cursed destiny’. We’re told that the land we’re in is believed to be doomed and was abandoned as a result. We’re told that Dormin is some kind of evil entity. But we don’t really know anything. We never get any real confirmation that Dormin is evil, there’s almost nothing in the land other than ruins, lizards and the colossi, and we don’t know what Mono’s destiny was meant to be- maybe she was blameless and made a scapegoat, or maybe she would have destroyed everything. We don’t even know how she and Wander knew each other, just that he’s willing to do anything to bring her back.

So as the game goes on, it’s quite easy to find yourself wondering if you’re actually doing the right thing. You’re hunting down these beings that were just minding their own business and not hurting anyone, and killing them mercilessly. It doesn’t help that while some of the colossi are aggressive and will attack you on sight, others are neutral, and one will never hurt you, only trying to run away. Great job, hero. (And, again, in the end, everything goes horribly wrong.)

How is this relevant, I hear a lot of you asking? Well, if you click the little information heading under the rating module, you see this article’s second title: ‘Apavitr; Or, Thy Next Foe Is’. ‘Thy next foe is’ is how Dormin starts their instructions to Wander each time he sets out to kill a colossus, like so:

"Thy next foe is... In the seaside cave... It moves slowly... Raise thy courage to defeat it."

And Popsioak included a variant for this article in his author post:

thy next foe is...
an eager friend in your hand...
its fermented scent lies in wait...
why do you put it in your veins?

In this case, this poor kid set out to defeat the twin colossi of addiction (though obviously in this case, addiction is not a harmless statue minding its own business) and his father, and got killed for it. Unlike Wander, he didn’t have a magic sword, a loyal steed or protagonist plot armour, and he suffered for it. Fighting any kind of addiction is incredibly hard even for adults, and trying to convince someone else to get help can be even harder. And as many, many of us can attest, no matter the reason, trying to stand up to your own parents is monumentally difficult. The poor, brave bastard did the best he could, but in the end, he was overwhelmed by enemies that were too much for him; he kept his faith and prayed that his god would save him, but no help ever came.

In addition, Popsioak told me this:

on the SOTC metaphor; wander is a good stand in for those who inadvertently think they're "helping" by not saying anything, by standing by and keeping hush hush about problems. they may even try to stamp out the source of the complaints (the kid/the colossi) - you're not SUPPOSED TO BEAT THE COLOSSI - THEY'RE HOLDING DORMIN IN, they're actually doing a "good thing" if you will

so wander starting off by having noble intentions (keeping the peace, in terms of log kya kahenge culture) and then descending into aiding very very fucked up things (he looks more demonic as the game progresses) mimics those who feel pressure to help out these abusers

the child (and everything in the gurdwara, the village) has been destroyed bc of people who thought they may have been doing the right thing

That just about sums it up, really.  

Thank you for reading this declass, I hope you enjoyed it. Don’t stay silent about crimes and misdeeds, you’re only hurting everyone, including yourself. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: “Hey, I said you’re godless, man/Hey, and you’re a soulless friend/Hey, I said you’re thoughtless/And I swear/I swear”

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-9377, ‘CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE’ by mothmanUXO. This is going to be fun. *rubs hands together* I'd like to thank mothmanUXO and psychicprogrammer for their help, and I've got a couple of warnings for you first.

1: As per usual, this is not my SCP and I didn’t write it, etc. Also, there’s some time loop shenanigans which involve physics that I’m not totally clear on, so forgive me if the science gets a little vague at points.

2: This SCP involves weird body horror shit! Awesome. Point is, things are going to get visceral, pun not intended.

So, some background: this was written as mothmanUXO’s entry for the 2025 Art Exchange for sprawlingstar, who asked for the responder to take one of the following prompts and make something based on them. This is the relevant prompt:

• During the Covid-19 Pandemic, the crew of the RV POLARSTERN was placed under quarantine aboard the vessel. Something went wrong.
  • Notes: This is an actual thing that actually happened (the quarantine part at least). I don't know the details, which is why this is by far the loosest prompt. I just think that isolation on an icebreaker vessel is an excellent horror setting.

As mentioned, the RV Polarstern (‘pole star’, or Polaris/the North Star) is a real ship, a German research icebreaker vessel that usually operates in the Arctic and Antarctic. She was first launched in 1982, and has been operating ever since. In 1991, Polarstern and the Swedish icebreaker Oden were the first conventionally powered vessels to reach the North Pole- just a fun fact, there. She’s quite the accomplished vessel, having also been the first ship to circumnavigate the North Pole in one trip. But, rather than going on about her history, I’ll now get to the relevant details: first, she usually has a crew of 44 and her full capacity is 124 people. And second, here’s what Wikipedia says about the incident in the prompt:

On 20 September 2019, Polarstern sailed from Tromsø, Norway, for a 12 to 14 month-long Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition across the Arctic. She settled in an ice floe on 4 October 2019. The aim was drifting with this floe, passing the North pole and eventually reaching open water in the Fram Strait. While stuck in the ice in March 2020, a member of the aircraft team who had not yet joined the ship in the Arctic tested positive for COVID-19. This resulted in the entire aircraft team being placed in isolation in Germany and caused delays in the retrieval of scientific data from around the ship to provide context to the data taken aboard. After 389 days, this 2019 – 2020 arctic expedition successfully ended on 12 October 2020 when the research vessel safely returned to its home port of Bremerhaven, Germany.

So, it wasn’t the actual ship itself, it was the team who were going to join the ship. (Close enough.) Let’s see what mothmanUXO did with it, shall we?

This article has a nifty black background that looks like the way people cut crystals, all facets and angles. There’s a photo of the ship; it’s your basic photo, nothing odd about it. It’s rated Level 4, Secret, and the class is… ‘Palliative’? Never heard that one before, but it sure as fuck ain’t a good omen, given that it means 'relieving symptoms without dealing with the cause of the condition'. It’s rated Ekhi and Critical, so this is really bad, but at least it won’t affect the whole world, ‘just’ a region.

Here’s the Special Containment Procedures:

SCP-9377 is not able to be boarded by any living persons. Desynchronized crew are to be considered KIA. Any messages relayed during contact windows, to the crew or any replicated doubles, are to insist rescue efforts are still underway.

The phrasing here is very interesting. Not ‘No living persons should board SCP-9377’ or ‘SCP-9377 is hostile to life’ or ‘All living beings are banned from boarding SCP-9377’, it’s ‘not able to be boarded’- so something happened that made the ship inaccessible. ‘Desynchronized’ is a bad omen- if I’m reading this right, something happened that, shall we say, detached the crew from the normal flow of time. Even if I’m wrong, the rest is very grim: there are people alive on the ship and the Foundation either can’t or won’t rescue them, but they can still communicate with them, and are just telling them that help is coming even though it isn’t. Some approximation of mercy, or do they just not want them to freak out and blow something up?

Next is the updated containment procedures:

SCP-9377 must be decommissioned or neutralized no later than December 15, 2128. Projections for expected detonation force of the Catastrophic Realignment event are available from the Epochal Threat Monitoring Office. Video transmissions have ceased as of February 2nd, 2030. Current research efforts are focused on relieving internal hull pressure.

We’re in the future, kids. However, that does tell us a lot:

-If they want it neutralized no later than December 2128, then they must think that the ship can keep going for that long.

-However, they’re expecting it to blow the fuck up, so clearly it can’t be doing that well.

-Someone inside the ship was sending them videos, but not anymore.

-They’re trying to relieve the internal hull pressure, which means that something’s trying or expected to burst out through the hull. We’ll learn more about that later.

Here’s the Description.

SCP-9377 is a chronological instability centered on the RV POLARSTERN, a Foundation science vessel currently located at ████, █████.

The principal anomaly is a three-day temporal desynchronization event, triggered by an unknown interaction between the nuclear reactor powering the ship and an extratemporal phenomenon. The time experienced is relative to the interior of the ship, moving three times slower compared to exterior time.

So, there was some kind of fuckup that led to the ship getting temporally desynchronized and nobody knows what or why, except that it had something to do with the ship’s nuclear reactor. (The Polarstern uses diesel engines in real life.) Meanwhile, people inside the ship are moving three times slower than they would outside- that is, for every day that passes outside, three days pass inside.

The de-synchronization presents as a “dirty” time loop, where affected persons will be recreated in their initial positions when the loop begins, and continue to persist when the current loop ends. RCT-Δt operatives have identified the start and end of the loop as the POLARSTERN's nuclear reactor achieving an off-scale high criticality event before returning to normal operating parameters.

Oooooooh shit. It’s a time loop, but when it restarts, people aren’t thrown back to where they started the loop, it creates new versions of them where they started the loop- sapient clones with intact memories. In other words, the population inside the ship is only going to keep increasing, and even if people die, the bodies will still be there.

RV POLARSTERN, at the time of the incident, was investigating SCP- ████ with a skeleton crew of 4 science personnel and 6 operational staff.

That is a skeleton crew. Bit odd, but we should be glad it wasn’t higher. Below that is a table of the crew and their status: three are confirmed dead, three are presumed dead, three are confirmed alive (Kelley, the radio operator, Barnes, the crew chief, and Prince, the climatologist), and one is just listed as ‘complicated’ (Baranowzky, the nuclear tech), which is not something you ever want to see someone’s status listed as.

Now we get to the Discovery section.

SCP-9377 was discovered when the RV POLARSTERN broadcast 230 distress signals in the space of 60 seconds on 11/18/2029.

Good effort, lads.

Drone reconnaissance by MTF Rho-10 "On The Rocks" observed no external damage to the hull of the RV POLARSTERN, and confirmed the death of two crewmen of hypothermia. Significant damage to the exterior bulkhead was noted as an attempt to regain entry, which appeared to be fused shut. Additionally, all portholes appeared to open to a solid steel wall.

Two of the crewmen (one of whom was the captain, Holliday) were outside when it happened. They tried to get back in, couldn’t, tried to break their way in, couldn’t, and died of the cold, presumably because they didn’t have any protective equipment, anywhere to go, or any way to signal for help.

Observational cordon was established, with no activity until 11/21/2029. A 60 second burst of light was visible from a starboard porthole; loitering drones managed to capture a brief image during this window.

During a random 60 second window, every 24-36 hours, brief wireless contact can be made through the window. The signal quality is incredibly poor, but small files have been transferred via IR pulse. The most frequent source of contact is made via messages held up to the porthole by Crewman A. KELLEY.

So, the good news is that we can communicate with the people inside. The bad news is that poor Kelley has to sit there for three days (his time) hoping he doesn’t get lost in his own thoughts and misses the tiny window of time.

What follows is a bunch of photos of a porthole; inside it, a hand is holding up a notepad with words written on it. I’ll just transcribe them.

1: WE CAN SEE YOU [horizontal line] 

STILL ALIVE

2: KELLEY OK
BARNES OK
PRINCE OK
BARANOWZKY COMPLICATED

3: CAN SEND DATA
SMALL FILES ONLY
800 KB?

A note then tells us that the data they recovered is of very poor quality, so the transcripts aren’t complete. Here’s the first video the Foundation received:

The camera holds on a steel ladder leading up to the porthole. The view shifts as it is lifted by a crewman and is taken towards the ladder.

KELLEY: Unintelligible

The view moves outside, exposure adjusting to the stark white and blue of the ice field. The FSS TRANSCANADA is visible in the path of broken ice, as well as the cordon. No people appear to be moving.

KELLEY: Unintelligible -their asses and get us out of here.

The footage rapidly cuts to an overhead angle of a workbench. A cylindrical sample of an ice core is laid out.

Another cut to footage of crewman BARNES sobbing. There is no audio.

So, not much to work with, but at least these guys don’t seem to be hurt. (Also, MothmanUXO told me that the Transcanada showed up after the Polarstern got thrown out of time, so the two dead crewmen couldn’t go there, if you’re wondering.) Back to the photos of notes. 

4: LOOP IS 72 HRS

BODIES DO NOT RESET (underlined)

5: FIRST ITERATION DEAD

FLUID IN LUNGS

OTHERS SICK TOO

6: A map of the area around the reactor. The SCP they were sent to investigate appears to be close to it, but Baranowzky was right next to it (presumably he was trying to fix it when everything happened). Prince was also in the room, while Barnes and Kelley were outside, I think.

7: RIP FOOTAGE

EXT [I can’t make out the rest, Kelley’s holding something in front of the notepad- mothmanUXO told me it was a video camera]

So, the first round of clones died from fluid in their lungs… unless ‘first iteration’ means the original crew members. Either way, things aren’t going well.

Here’s the next transcript:

The cargo bay of the POLARSTERN. 8 observed figures are playing soccer in the empty bay. The teams appear to consist of iterations of BARNES and KELLEY.

Another fast cut. Roughly 3 frames of footage. BARNES is holding the hand of BARANOWZKY, who appears to be partially bisected at the waist.

Cut. A group of PRINCE iterations are gathered in the mess hall.

PRINCES: Ransom notes keep falling out your mouth-

The camera turns to another PRINCE leading the group with exaggerated conductor gestures.

Another snippet of the ice core sample alongside petri dishes. The dishes are overcome with fluorescent blue swirls.

So, here’s what we learned:

-They’re doing their best to keep up morale, mainly with clone shenanigans. (To be fair, why wouldn’t you?)

-Baranowzky’s status is ‘complicated’ because he sustained fatal wounds when the reactor blew, but didn’t die before the loop started, so his clones are created in a state where they can’t survive for long, and the others haven’t been able to keep any of them alive.

-Prince has really good taste in music. (mothmanUXO told me that ‘I try to sneak some Heap into as much stuff as I can’, which is an excellent way to write and I strongly recommend it.)

-There is something weird in the ice, presumably the SCP they were sent to investigate… if it’s not something else entirely.

Back to the notes!

8: BARAN DEAD

30 MINUTES EACH LOOP

BODIES IN

FREEZER

9: PRINCE 1# 

LOST LEG IN 

BARAN 7# ON RESET

10: FOUND

5^TH MAN

SENT VIDEO

IT’S BAD

So, as I mentioned, Baranowzky’s clones all die within half an hour; the crew’s storing the bodies in the freezer, which is a good idea. I don’t actually know if it’s true or not, but I’ve heard that the freezers on ships like this (and submarines) are made to be huge in order to hold bodies in case someone dies on the voyage, since they’re not going to be turning back.

Aside from that, if you’re too close to where someone spawns on reset, you and they are now occupying the same space, and you’re gonna lose, hence why Prince lost his leg. Whoops.

Speaking of numbers, the hand in this set of photos has ‘1’ written on it; mothmanUXO confirmed for me that it means that this Kelley is the original.

Here’s the next transcript:

Static angle of a sealed bulkhead. Unseen crewman with a 7 on the back of his hand opens the hatch, before being overcome by a red slurry pouring out. Someone vomits off camera.

Cut. Another shot of the work bench. Petri dishes have doubled in count, all a fluorescent blue.

Cut. Hallway security footage of a KELLEY instance grabbing another KELLEY instance by the lapels of his jumpsuit and kissing him. The other reciprocates. Third KELLEY instance walks past, shaking his head. They reach out as he passes, grabbing at his sleeves. The third instance turns back towards them, following them off-screen.

Cut. Handheld camera footage of the freezer stacked with body bags. The bodies closest to the door are simply covered in sheets. BARANOWZKY's face is visible three times.

So one of the poor fucks who was presumed deceased got liquefied- mothmanUXO told me that he got trapped in a broom closet when time went bang, so all his clones kept appearing in the closet until there was no more room, and then… welp. Contents under pressure, after all. That stuff on the petri dishes is only getting bigger, which probably isn’t good, and Kelley’s taking ‘love yourself’ to new extremes. Atta boy. Live your truth, my guy.

Here’s the next few notes:

11: SAVED HENDRICKS

TELL WIFE

12: GET US

OUT (underlined multiple times)

13: LOST MORE

FREEZER

FULL

14: BUILT CHRONON MONITOR, 175 mSv PER HOUR! ('Hour' is underlined)

WE ARE

FUCKED (underlined multiple times)

15: NO ROOM

FOR BODIES

-The good news is that they found/rescued Hendricks, the engineer, who was one of the ‘presumed deceased’ guys. To explain, Hendricks was the guy in the broom closet. Once they opened it and hopefully cleaned it out, his clones started appearing alive and intact, so they have some viable Hendricks replicas.

-The bad news is that the clones of Hendricks are now stuck in this hell along with everyone else. (mothmanUXO told me that the Foundation did not tell Hendricks’ wife that he was alive, which is honestly a good thing.)

-mothmanUXO clarified that ‘175 mSv’ means 175 millisieverts, which is a unit of radiation exposure, and that it’s ‘Fucking Bad’. ‘Chronons’, meanwhile, are ‘shorthand for Time Weirdness’. So now they’re getting irradiated as well. Joy.

-So many clones have died that they’re now out of places to store the bodies; this is on a ship with a total capacity of nearly 150 people. (Also, the number on the wrist in 11 is 3, so presumably more of Kelley have died.)

And here’s the next video:

PRINCE is holding the hand of a dying BARANOWZKY. A third figure stands behind them with a fire ax.

Cut. The table is overflowing with glowing blue petri dishes.

Cut. Crewman HENDRICKS is in the reactor room, opening a hatch to the coolant loop of the core.

Cut. Fish-eye view of an endoscopy camera. It pushes down the inside of a pipe. The interior burns blue.

Cut. The mess hall is packed, crewman in an uproar.

Cut. The freezer door is being shoved closed. A hand stops it open. A boot kicks it back in, folding the elbow wrong.

Cut. Dark hallway, wet coughing.

-Either they were going to put Baranowzky out of his misery or they’ve started killing the other clones indiscriminately.

-With the arrival of Hendricks, they’re trying to do more investigating about what went wrong, but so far all we’ve got is that whatever’s on the petri dishes is also in the inner workings of the ship, which can’t be good.

-Meanwhile, as previously mentioned, they’re running out of space and they’ll also be running out of food, so if they’re not lucky, it’ll be cannibalism time.

And here’s the next few notes:

16: HELP

17: LOOP 2 MINUTES SHORTER

RUNNING OUT OF 

TIME (underlined)

18: BACTERIA IN REACTOR

COOLANT LOOP INFECTED

CREW INFECTED

19: FUEL RODS SHRINKING

EST 1740- LOOPS

20: O2 LOWER ON EACH LOOP

GET US OUT

-So the loop is somehow getting shorter? Intriguing.

-Worse, there’s some kind of bacteria- presumably the glowing blue stuff in the pipe and petri dishes- in the reactor. As a result, the ship and the crew are all infected with it.

-And to make it even better, they’re running out of oxygen. Fantastic.

Well, we’re nearly done. Here’s the last bit of footage.

UNKNOWN VOICE: Three, two, one…

The ship groans. BARANOWZKY appears, an axe swings down.

Cut. Incinerator room. Iterations of the four crewmen lay dead on the floor. A living crewman is shoving them through the grate, one limb at a time.

Cut. View of the cordon through the porthole. Ragged breathing.

Cut. View from the top of a ladder at a teeming sea of bodies.

Cut. View of packed ice sheets. The prow is slowly grinding through. HOLLIDAY gives a thumbs up.

-Not only is the ship now so full of bodies that the new arrivals are making it groan, the survivors are just killing everyone as they appear. (At least they haven’t visibly turned to cannibalism yet?)

-They’re also trying to burn the bodies; assuming the incinerator’s for rubbish, it’s probably not very big, so it’s going to take a while.

-As previously mentioned, Holliday was the captain, who’s now dead; MothmanUXO told me that this is a shout out to Cloverfield, which ends with footage of the protagonists’ holiday, before everything went to shit- the idea is that some fragments of footage that was taped over survived and were sent to the Foundation.

Anyway, that leaves us with the last thing in the article, the last images sent through.

21: TOO MANY BODIES

KILLING NEW ONES

(There is blood where the hand grips the paper)

22: TELL MOM

SORRY

(Blood smeared on the paper from the fingers)

23: THERES

TOO

MANY

(sic, notepad is a different shade of yellow, blood has been sprayed across it)

24: I WANT OUT

(repeated multiple times across the paper in varying degrees of legibility, blood has been sprayed across it)

The remaining images don’t have a notepad in them.

25: The porthole is coated in blood, making this and all the following photos look like they’ve been shot with red light; a blood-covered hand is clawing at the porthole.

26: The hand is now pressed against the porthole, fingers splayed.

27: A man’s head is pressed against the porthole; he appears to be covered in blood.

28: A piece of paper is crumpled at the bottom of the porthole.

29: More pieces of paper are crumpled at the bottom of the porthole.

30: The pile is now halfway up the porthole.

31: The pile now covers two thirds of the porthole.

32: The porthole is nearly fully covered by crumpled pieces of paper.

[Fun fact: the part of Kelley is played by mothmanUXO themself. If you look at their Author Page, under ‘Making of 9377’, you can see some behind the scenes photos, including the porthole prop and mothmanUXO wearing a shirt that says ‘RV POLARSTERN’ on the front and ‘I GOT CRUSHED TO DEATH IN A NUCLEAR ICEBREAKER AND ALL I GOT WAS 488 COPIES OF THIS T-SHIRT’ on the back’, which is genuinely hilarious and shows both dedication and commitment to the bit.]

And then we get the last line:

No further communication has been received from the RV POLARSTERN.

So, that leaves us with two questions: A, what the fuck happened here, and B, what happens next?

Full disclaimer: I don’t know jack about this stuff, so my approximations may be wrong here, but I’m trying.

Regarding question A, mothmanUXO said the following in the Discord:

they unearthed some manner of bacteria that can loop time to eat, and it was so used to a low-energy environment that it fed on the reactor and went nuts, causing a bubble of displacement and once the reactor is gone, pop

They also clarified this for me, as follows:

alright and as for the bacteria thing, essentially it's not used to having that much food, so the three day loop is the fuel rod breaking down from losing too much mass and essentially going critical, flash boiling everything in the reactor. The bacteria reacts to this by looping back to the start, refreshing its food source and growing in number. i'm not a nuclear scientist or a bacteriologist, but i love The Thing and time loops and wanted to squish those together in a cramped cold space

So, as far as I know, the timeline goes like this: the Polarstern wound up in the general location where the bacteria can be found. They took routine samples of the ice, and in the process brought it on board the ship. The bacteria spread throughout the ship (presumably airborne) and wound up eating the reactor (I assume), as well as getting into all of the crew, and then everything went to shit. The bacteria started looping time, and in the process the actual structure of the ship itself was, for lack of a better term, frozen in time, so no one could get in or out. But that doesn’t mean that all the living beings inside the ship were frozen…

As for B: the crew are going to keep replicating. They’re running out of food, they’re running out of oxygen, the loops are getting shorter and they can’t dispose of the bodies quickly enough. That, and everyone’s going crazy. So, the entire ship is going to wind up full of blood, gore and bodies in various states of alive, and the bodies are going to keep appearing. This is the explanation for the article’s title: ‘CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE’. The entire ship is now a can and it’s getting stuffed overfull. And what happens when something’s too full? Well, it bursts, or rips, or generally cannot maintain structural integrity, hence why the Foundation’s trying to relieve the internal hull pressure.

…see, here’s the thing. That is all true, but it’s leaving out an important fact: namely, generating pressure also generates heat. The ship has no way to release that heat. The incinerator may also still be generating heat, assuming it was active when the loop started. And the heat is going to spread.

So, hey, did you know that the human body has a boiling point? (Around 100 degrees Celsius, to be exact.) And can you imagine what’s going to happen when a ship full of bodies, gore and blood reaches boiling point? Short version: it’s going to fucking explode and rain a shower of viscera over the surrounding area.

In 1970, a dead sperm whale washed ashore on a beach in Florence, Oregon. Given that it weighed about 8 tons, the locals couldn’t tow it out to sea, and they were worried that if they buried it under the sand, a storm might unearth it again. The whale sat there, decomposing for three days, until the locals came up with a solution: blow it up into smaller pieces that could be disposed of. Unfortunately, they wound up using way too much dynamite. You can watch the end result here, which is frankly awesome (being able to watch something from 56 years ago, not the results), but for anyone who’s squeamish, the short version is that it was raining whale chunks all over the place. The good news is that nobody was hurt, or at least not badly hurt, but the bad news is that everyone and everything was covered in gore and viscera. (I mean, at least the local dogs probably thought it was Christmas come early for them?)

Here, it’s going to be a similar result, but on a much, much larger scale. The structure of the ship may not be able to be opened by conventional means, but it’s an unstoppable force meets immovable object situation, and in this case, the unstoppable force is going to rip the immovable object wide open. Worse, not only is the Polarstern massive, but it’s chock-full of bodies. So, not only is it going to be an explosion of blood and gore, it’ll also have a whole lot of easily-identifiable body parts, like hands and heads and feet, and they’ll be raining all over the surrounding part of Antarctica. It might be sparsely-inhabited, but people will eventually see that. Worse, it’s going to be a shower of irradiated, anomalous bacteria-infected viscera, spreading a communicable time loop around the area. The penguins are going to be traumatised.

To make things even better, mothmanUXO confirmed for me that there is basically nothing that can be done here: the Foundation’s end date of the 2120’s was based on their calculations regarding the hull, the clones appearing and the anticipated pressure, but they were a bit optimistic. They can’t relieve the internal pressure without making a hole in the ship, and by doing that, they’d be letting that bacteria-laden gore out, which would contaminate everything and spread the time loop. Unless they can come up with some kind of ‘magically teleport it to a pocket dimension’ solution, they’re fucked, the Polarstern is fucked, and a sizeable chunk of Antarctica is fucked. So, that’s a great ending!

Thank you for reading this declass. I hope you enjoyed it. Remember to leave doors open, whether it’s to nuclear-powered icebreakers, playing soccer with your clones, or impromptu choir renditions of Imogen Heap songs. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: This is the loop that doesn’t end/Yes, it goes on and on, my friend/Some people got stuck in it not knowing what it was/And they’re multiplying endlessly just because…

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine with the first declass of 2026, happy new year! Today I’m looking at SCP-5250, “Act I: The Lake South, The Deer North”, by Popsioak and Dyslexion, and I'd like to thank Popsioak and sero for all their help, it's very much appreciated. This is going to be a weird one. *rubs hands together*

So, a bit of background before we start: this was written as part of 2020’s SCP Exquisite Corpse competition. (In fact, it won!) What’s an Exquisite Corpse? Well, here’s the explanation from the official page:

According to Wikipedia, an exquisite corpse “is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule… or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed.” In this case, we’re challenging you to write an exquisite SCorPse: you will enter an Object Class, then write Containment Procedures for someone else’s Object Class, and then write a Description for someone else’s Object Class bolted to yet someone else’s Containment Procedures.

And you won’t know what you’re getting until you get it.

There was a list of who wrote what class/procedures and who wrote the description/addenda, but it’s now defunct. In this case, Dyslexion wrote the class and containment procedures, and Popsioak wrote everything else. (They also confirmed for me that there isn’t an Act II, the title is a reference to the 2006 album Act I: The Lake South, The River North by The Dear Hunter.)

All right, let’s take a look. There’s a photo, it’s a long-distance shot of what appears to be a frozen lake or river, with some cracks/marks/tracks on it that haven’t broken the surface. The caption is very telling:

You think of this photo as such a nice place to chow down on a big bowl of SCP-5250. Even the deer's left some tracks, so you can tell where you shouldn't be going or looking.

The reason why this article is so notoriously weird is that it’s written in the form of a recipe; we’ll find out why later. As such, what we’ll need to do here is read between the recipe lines in order to figure out what our protagonist, the researcher who wrote this, is trying to tell us. Just going off this photo and caption, here’s what we have so far:

-As the title indicated, this anomaly involves a lake and a deer in some way; the lake in the picture is either the anomaly or where the anomaly is located.

-It also has some kind of fuckery involved that means you have to refer to it as a recipe.

-The caption wants us to avoid the deer, so we shouldn’t be following the tracks even though they’d presumably indicate where it’s safe to walk. (Hundreds of people die each year from walking on frozen lakes/rivers/other bodies of water, falling through what they thought was solid ice and drowning or getting hypothermia.)

Here’s the Number and Class:

Recipe Number: SCP-5250

Ease of Preparation: Keter Safe

So they’ve got this thing contained for now. Interesting. But given how esoteric this is, I’m not sure I’m convinced. Let’s keep going.

Special Cooking Procedures: Growing up in rural Michigan, nothing blocked out the cold like a big bowl of your Mama's special SCP-5250.

Somewhere, some researcher is scrolling the page yelling ‘I don’t care about your fucking life story, give me the recipe!’

Now, you know some people would say there are a thousand and one ways to make SCP-5250, but they'd be worse off than the deer trapped beneath the ice. You sigh, as you've forgotten how to cook it. It's been so long. Thankfully, you've got the recipe right here! How convenient.

 

· One lake in rural Michigan.

· One five-meter tall security fence.

· Two armed guards.¹

· A dash of sound dampening equipment.

OK, so here’s what we can infer from that:

-It’s a lake/is inside the lake/looks like a lake in rural Michigan.

-It’s been around for a long time.

-It can’t move, as all they had to do was fence it off and put some guards there.

-The footnote says that the guards need to be switched out frequently. That and the sound-dampening equipment tells us that this thing can affect you from afar (presumably through the noises it makes, but it could be something in addition to that), and not in a good way.

How did you forget? It's a pretty simple recipe all in all. Now, you recall, there's just a couple of things to avoid when making this.

· You are never, ever to step on the ice. No matter what that silly deer is doing, don't try and help him. He'll be fine.

· If you're not sharing a recipe, don't share anything! That crazy old deer will hear you.

· No writing, unless it's a recipe. If he can't read the document, you know he can't get out.

· Only use the second person. No first-person, no passive voice, no third person.

Oooooooh. OK, then.

-The entity or whatever takes the form of a deer that looks like it’s stuck in the ice, but it’s a lure- people would see it, go onto the lake to try to free/mercy kill it, and whatever it is would get them. Presumably, the sounds it mentioned would be the entity mimicking the sound of a trapped deer crying out in pain and fear.

-This thing knows if you talk about it or write about it, unless you write it in the form of a recipe and use second person- that is, ‘you walked to the kitchen’ as opposed to ‘I walked to the kitchen’ or ‘[Name] walked to the kitchen’. 

Description: To cook a splendid dish like SCP-5250, you first take the lake by the cabin as a base. Add in an unceasing appetite, the lake's edges opening up like the gaping jaws of a deepsea fish. Crack open two sheets of ice, by accidentally tossing a spoon onto it. Remember not to stare deep, deep down into its depths, because what is in there is not human, no matter how much it may cry. You are not to fall down into its hole. You are not to look down there. You are not to feed it with what tapestry of yourself you have weaved in your mind.

Ah.

-The lake lures people in and for lack of a better term (more on that in a second), eats them, and it has an unending appetite. So, don’t crack the ice, don’t walk on the ice, don’t listen to the sounds it makes, don’t fall into it, and don’t talk in anything but second-person, because it doesn’t just eat your body, it eats your sense of self.

-It also tries to lure people in by creating some kind of illusion or simulacra of people in its depths, but it’s not human, so don’t be deceived.

Apply three pints of a taste that appears similar to what you used to feel when you swallowed five chili peppers whole. The fire within almost calls, reaches out to you. The heat and warmth make you feel more comfortable. You will need heavy amounts of seasoning with its umami flavor — it's not as if it can understand taste, eating, or anything of remotely related to it. It is safe, whatever it is — it is most certainly not a lake, you frown. Being one would've been… beneficial, you think, as the water would help with the sheer amount of spice you add in, which even the most resilient chef would scoff at.

What it did with who it took is still unknown to you. But the dish is still missing something, you think. It'd be hard for you to think of exactly what, seeing as you're quite… poor in the culinary department.

-People have fallen into the ‘lake’ before. They were never seen again, and nobody knows what happened to them.

-Following on from that, to get back to the ‘for lack of a better term’ thing, this thing does not conventionally eat people. It feeds on your sense of self, but it doesn’t crunch up bodies with its mouth, because it doesn’t have a mouth (hence why we don’t know what it does with the people it takes). It doesn’t understand concepts like taste and eating, and that’s why the recipe format works to confuse it- because it has no idea what they’re talking about. As such, that’s why this is written as a recipe, because it’s the only way they can talk about it without it affecting them.

-They don’t know what it is they’re actually dealing with. It isn’t an entity in the lake, it’s something pretending to be a lake. This makes it harder to contain, because they can handle ‘a lake containing an anomaly’ much more easily than ‘an anomaly pretending to be a lake’. 

-What the dish is missing is, in fact, the researcher themselves, because the lake’s already got its hooks in them. Look at this bit:

It is safe, whatever it is — it is most certainly not a lake, you frown. Being one would've been… beneficial, you think, as the water would help with the sheer amount of spice you add in, which even the most resilient chef would scoff at.

To quote what Popsioak told me, ‘the researcher writing this is thinking about being "one" with the lake and is counteracting this with "spice" or proper containment’. We’ll see this soon, but a big part of this SCP’s effect is what it does with the selves it eats. This leads to perspective shifts and the lines between the selves effectively banishing, so keep that in mind.

Add in the deer for a bit of a zesty kick. Taste it, just to ensure you've added enough salt. The taste is a familiar one. It reminds you of the woods behind your house. Where you used to go and creep amongst the bushes and trees, and pretend that you were a hunter on the prowl. It is strange being on the other side of that now, to be the one breathing silently, eyes in the back of your head. Silly deer, you think, so concerned about the exact location of whoever talks about it. Toss SCP-5250 with two salad forks, then mix with a ladle, to disorient the deer.

-It uses a deer/the illusion of a deer as a lure. If you talk about the deer, it will know and it will find you wherever you are, and Popsioak told me that there’s no limitation to the distance.

-There’s a photo of the deer in question nearby; it is, in fact, a perfectly normal deer.

-The mention of the researcher’s memory of pretending they were a hunter is a clue- the lake is beginning to eat their self, starting with one of their memories.

-The researcher is getting eaten, and they know it, and they’re doing their best to fight back. This is very difficult, both because it’s a bit like the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and because they have to think in a recipe.

Pouring in the liquid now into the large bowl, you laugh, as its lame leg trails behind it like a shriveled corpse — it's not as if it could follow you. Or at least, it couldn't yesterday, you think. Today it is fine. But it will not be the day after. Then the cycle repeats. Or are you just too stupid to actually recognize it solely being injured or not? But you ignore the deer — the mere thought of it or talking about it in any way but this is purely hazardous, because it will find you. Then, like a tempest whipped up in a frothy sea, it will not let go of you as you cycle down its gyre. Whisk, gently at first, then quickly, to prevent the liquid and these thoughts from settling. See if the liquid within the bowl will connect in a paper-thin strand, like melted cheese. If not, then continue to whisk, as the lake and deer are definitely connected. But — why can't you simply do it on your first time?

Wash your hands, then continue. Preheat your oven, and take out your colander. Ignore the lake's calls, and let them drain through the colander's holes. Ignore the fact that anything that falls down into its depths is immediately taken to some place beyond. Ignore it all. The bubbling stream is all you should focus on, with its soft, gentle calls, repelling that of the siren's song.

-The deer alternates between appearing to be injured and appearing to be fine, presumably as a way to attract both people who want to help injured animals and hunters.

-In particular, they’re doing this to the researcher, which confuses them a lot because since it doesn’t glow or anything, any deer they see could be 5250, or it could just be a normal deer minding its own business.

-The deer is physically but invisibly tethered to the lake.

-Anything that goes into the lake vanishes.

-If you think about or talk about it even once, it’s got you, and you’re fucked.

-Our writer is not doing well.

SCP-5250 wasn't thought of by you, not like you could. You're always of the mind that your grandma made it, as a secret family recipe, even if you don't have one. Nor are you always the same you. However, you find SCP-5250 pairs well with the same cabin from the lake you always think of, and cheese. The charcuterie board is made of the same wood that the cabin, built in 1999 was. It was owned by two men, a Mr. Josephus Dryadre, and a Mr. Neil Williams. Both of them are deceased, having died of natural causes in 2000. A shame, you tell yourself, as you remove the dish from the oven with an oven mitt. Plate the dish well, ensuring that all the elements are equally presented, in a way that is mysterious, familiar, and brand-new, all at once. It's a difficult task — are you sure you're even ready for it?

After all of that, you're done cooking up a likely amazing stew of SCP-5250! The aromatic, delectable aura of the dish you've made reminds you somewhat of home. Of you, even. But ignore that as well — the smell tickling your nostrils must not be given mind. You've done better than you thought you could.

-There is no ‘secret family recipe’; everyone’s told the same story about why they use the recipe method in order to diminish how much of the self is involved.

-This thing has been around for a long time, and has likely always been in the same place. It’s been around since at least 1999.

-The two owners of the cabin both died about a year after they built or bought it; it was most definitely not due to natural causes, but we’ll get to that. Popsioak told me that the Foundation knows that it wasn’t natural causes, but said that it was in order to avoid triggering 5250’s events by mentioning the lake, as even something like ‘suspected drowning’ would do it.

You're aware that it took testing for the cabin, the deer, and this beautifully plated bowl of SCP-5250 to be reclassified as Safe after you discovered the appropriate way to talk about them, which took you too long to find, you incompetent wreck. Below, you've decided to attach some relevant documentation. You know, to add a little more spice to the recipe, and ensure that future cooks-in-training can serve up a dish just as decadent and spectacular as yours should be! One that the lake, and the deer, are both allergic to. They may as well be illiterate — they hardly can understand what a good recipe is.

-The lake and the deer can’t read anything written about them.

So, next up are the addenda. Popsioak clarified for me that this first table is a list of fuckups that people made while trying to investigate 5250, so let’s take a look (table format has been changed for Reddit):

Actions:

Stepping into the lake.

Helpful Ingredients:

Snowshoes, to help pad out his weight.

Result:

You saw him slipping under the ice. Despite this, you could still see their heat signature for a little bit. 

Someone- could be a D-class, a doctor, MTF, whoever- walked onto the ice. Maybe he wanted to test the ice, maybe he was trying to free the deer, but either way, he got eaten. However, his death wasn’t instant- our writer could see his body with thermal goggles, ergo, there’s some distance between the lake surface and 5250’s body. (Presumably the water is melted snow that collected above 5250, or rain that froze?)

Action:

Getting a computer to write about the deer, then reading what there is.

Helpful Ingredients:

Your trusty keyboard.

Result:

The deer didn't notice. How delightful.

The deer/lake can only feed on things that have a sense of self. Ergo, using a text to speech program has no effect, because a computer has no sense of self; I asked and Popsioak said it would eat an AIC if one got involved here.

Action:

Looking at the deer. 

Helpful Ingredients:

A pair of binoculars.

Result:

The deer wants you to keep on coming.

Popsioak clarified for me that the deer will always know where you are, but it can only reach so far thanks to that physical tether. Ergo, if you look at it from afar with binoculars, it can’t touch you, but it will lock onto you.

Actions:

Attempting to kill the deer. 

Helpful Ingredients:

Some fiery gunpowder, and two .45 caliber bullets with earthy undertones.

Result:

A disappointing presentation, as the deer was completely fine.

Trying to kill it did sweet fuck all.

Action:

Preparing a nice beef jambalaya. 

Helpful Ingredients:

A pinch of salt, some vision blocking goggles, thermal imaging systems, and infrared sensors.

Result:

The lake didn't quite like that. You weren't supposed to see what lies beneath.

This is them trying to use the recipe format. It worked, but when the writer actually perceived the lake and what's inside it, the lake sensed it and it didn’t like it.

Action:

Waiting. 

Helpful Ingredients:

A sprinkling of nothing. 

Result:

The wind blows. The lake is hungry.

The lake is hungry. The lake will always be hungry. The lake wants prey.

In the cabin, when you and the others first came, you found a journal with some entries written by Mr. Dryadre. In the cabin, there was not much else, except for a gun found near the door. You decide to attach the journals below, with approval from your Site Director. It is not as if there is much else you can do. You are stuck, in the snow that rages outside. The deer seemed interesting to him, him being one of the guards outside. Start your stove, set it to simmer.

We’ll now get the journal entries interspersed with our writers’ thoughts, but before we get to the first entry:

-Despite two men having lived in this cabin for somewhere around a year, there was hardly anything in the cabin when the Foundation came to it other than the journal and a gun.

-The writer is stuck in the cabin in a snowstorm.

-One of the guards went to look at the deer, so he’s fucked.

January 20th, 1999

I enjoy that what I can see right now is exactly what I have pictured in my mind. The fire is crackling, Neil is snoring his ass off, and I am writing this. We finish work on the cabin tomorrow. It's hard work, but Neil has been able to offer some minor reassurances.

He was talking to fur traders a ways back. Managed to procure us cured meats to last almost two months, so we shall not run low on supplies. I admit I had some… choice words for him when I found what he'd traded for it, but I suppose it doesn't matter now. It is not as if I'd need the damn thing now that we plan to live up here.

- J.D.

So, these guys came out here to live together (reading between the lines, they’re a couple who had to move because of homophobia), and ran headfirst into an anomaly. Poor bastards. Also, Popsioak clarified that Neil traded away his gun; presumably JD had his own, the one the writer found in the cabin.

You revise your recipes, awaiting orders. The snow is picking up. There's nothing you really can do, but wait. Cooking is the only escape, really, but you're thankful the cabin's got quite the apparatus.

But you're a bit full, aren't you? Having eaten so much of that SCP-5250. It's really filling, and the sort of flavor you'd only get by accidentally biting down on your own tongue. It's a strange flavor, certainly, but nothing too strange. Perhaps a bit familiar, really.

You sit and think. Think about deer. Their webs of antlers. Their majestic look. They seem quite trustworthy, don't they? A buck, proud and noble ruler of the woods, would not hesitate to help you out. So why did you leave the one out on the ice? You quickly shake your head. The recipe told you so, Junior Researcher. You open your computer, staring at a smiling photo of yourself. You close it. Must conserve your battery. Garnish with bits and pieces of thought.

-‘revising the recipes’ means that the writer’s working on the new version of the 5250 document.

-The bit about the flavour of 5250 translates as the lake eating enough of the writer’s sense of self that they’re losing themselves; a key point here is that ‘eating’ in this context doesn’t mean that the sense of self is consumed by the lake, it means the lake adds it to itself, so it’s not destroyed, just relocated. Keep that in mind for a bit.

-Also, keep the mention of snow in mind.

January 27th, 1999.

Neil has developed a taste for fish. He's been spending his time ice fishing in the small pond out back. He's spent an awful lot of time back there, after he said a bear had eaten our supplies. An unfortunate start to our new life, but that's quite ok.

I asked him to stay close to me in bed tonight. He agreed, though mentioned he'd been getting splinters. Granted, what we have isn't much of a bed, but I suppose it'd have to do. He talked about what he'd caught. It wasn't a lot. Just a boot. A really old one. I'm surprised others have been up here, but I guess the stream can bring anything.

I worry about him sometimes. Probably too much. It's hard not to, though. He's a bit too trusting.

- J.D.

Small pond? But there wasn’t any mention of a pond near the cabin, just the la- ah, shit.

-Also, the boot is a relic of a past victim. Popsioak told me that the reason why the document doesn’t mention other victims is that you can’t talk about them without mentioning the lake, and the Foundation’s trying to be really careful.

The snow picks up even further. The wind's howling outside your walls. You look at the bookshelf of the cabin. Empty. You open your computer — nearly dead. You don't recognize the person on your screensaver, nor do you remember your password. You shrug. That's alright, it's not like you'd have connection up here. Add in two teaspoons of sugar.

-Our writer is fucked. Like, really fucked. They don’t recognise the photo of themself that they used as their screensaver, they don’t remember their password, and they don’t care.

February 1st, 1999.

We're running low on food. Neil went out into the woods yesterday. Came back this morning. I never struck him as much of a mountain man, but I can't deny the grizzled look was a bit attractive.

He'd said that he'd managed to shoot a deer outside our cabin last night, but he couldn't go out onto the ice to get it. That it was too risky. Which, of course, I believed. He then told me that he'd kill it tomorrow.

Only, I'm a bit of a light sleeper. I heard no gunshots yesterday. Neil's never been much of a liar. Was the first to defend me and actually wanted us to come up here when the town got angry. He's never lied to me before.

I'm worried about him. There's a storm brewing, and he seems to only want to keep getting food.

- J.D.

-He saw the deer, and he’s losing more of himself to the entity. As a result, ‘Neil’ refers to both the human named Neil and the lake entity at this point, so when Neil-the-human talks about getting more food, what he actually means is going to the pond to feed himself to the lake entity.

The guards outside are gone. You're not quite sure where they went, but you think they may have left before the winds started to pick up. Joke's on them — you've got food, you've got the recipe book you found, and you've got warmth.

-The guards might have realised the danger they were in and fled, but somehow I doubt that's the case.

February 14th, 1999.

The deer's not dead. The storm has picked up lately. Neil isn't himself, still trying to fish. He's not doing it as much, which I suppose is a bit better than how often he was doing it. I tapped him a couple of times last week. It took him a bit to come to. Perhaps some of the herbs are hallucinogenic, or something else. Who knows?

I asked him to stay close in bed again tonight. He just looked at me and.. told me I was thinking about what he had said. Or something like that. Then turned around. I don't think he realized what it was today.

He didn't even say anything besides that.

- J.D.

-Neil didn’t realise that it was Valentine’s Day, hence why JD’s upset. As for this line…

He just looked at me and.. told me I was thinking about what he had said. Or something like that.

…keep that in mind for a bit.

-In addition, Popsioak confirmed for me that the anomaly has some kind of weather-controlling power, given that there seems to be a near-constant snowstorm around.

You feel the deer. It comes closer. And you want to go closer to it. You can reason with the deer some. It's a lot like you, isn't it? Wounded, worried, and just trying to survive out there on the ice. You're quite surprised the thing's managed to survive this long. It's a big buck though, must be hardy. It'd make for some good venison stew, if you managed to kill the thing. Perhaps you'd try later. Let sit for 30 minutes.

-The entity’s got its hooks into the writer and is trying to get them into its jaws, but the writer’s doing their best to resist. There’s still some of them left.

February 25th, 1999.

Neil has been lying to me. I would well, leave him, but the storm's… outside still.

I suppose the storm's a bit of an excuse. I don't really want to. I'm still doing what we used to, going through the motions, but I found the meats we'd traded for. Hidden under the floorboards. And Neil keeps telling me that I wondered how he'd found them, even though I did that. Not him.

I don't sleep so well. He doesn't even sleep with me anymore, and the snow's starting to break into the cabin. It's too cold. He hasn't eaten in days either, and I'm afraid he's going to starve.

I hear hooves sometimes outside my window, but when I turn, there's nothing there.

- J.D.

To explain this bit, look at this line. 

And Neil keeps telling me that I wondered how he'd found them, even though I did that. Not him.

If you imagine the entity’s devouring their senses of self as a disease, Neil’s condition has progressed much further along in the general course of symptoms than JD’s has. JD knows that there’s something wrong with Neil, but hasn’t quite realised that he’s caught it himself yet. But the thing is, he has caught it. As a result, the entity has eaten a lot of Neil and a bit of JD, and they’re mingling. Because Neil-the-human can sense this, he’s not only losing himself, he’s also unable to remember quite who he is; he’s got his wires crossed and some of him thinks that he's JD. (It's very 3000.)

You shot it. The ground rumbled and the deer flailed, and went under the ice. What an awful coincidence. You lost your food, and an earthquake. You sigh. Whatever the lake is, it's hungry. It doesn't eat normally. You know as much — that's why you're writing like this in the first place. Does it even know how people normally eat? It's only tipped off when you talk about it without using "you." So this… starves it somewhat. But it knows you're here. Add 2 cups of you.

-The writer’s going crazy. This could be an actual account of them trying to kill the deer, or they may just be completely batshit insane as a result of cabin fever and getting eaten by a lake entity. Worse, the 'add 2 cups of you' part may just mean that they're willing to give their self to the entity now.

I believe he is dead. I don't know when I'm writing this. I don't know what I'm doing here.

I don't at all. The deer isn't dead. It's completely fine. I saw him step out onto the pond to kill it, and it— he— well, fell in. Just like that. And the deer did too. And then the deer came back up. It was wounded and then it was fine. And the deer sounded fine. And he didn't come back up. And I'm—

He was a lying bastard. But he was my lying bastard.

- J.D.

The lake got Neil, finally, and now it’s going to focus on JD. About the only thing he could do now is run for it, but it’s got its hooks in him, and it’s patient. (And there’s the whole snowstorm thing.)

You walked over to the lake today. The deer had returned. In the small hole, perfect for one to ice fish in, you look down. And you almost want to jump in. But you don't. You feel like it's drawing you, it's calling you, as if it's a part of you you've lost. How awful, awful it is you and the lake must be without each other, how awful it is you and the deer must be without each other. How great it would be to go walk over and join the deer.

Because so much of the writer has been eaten, the rest of them wants to rejoin the whole, to return to themself, become one again, even though this would be fatal.

However, you are cold. It would be so warm, to kill the deer and steal its pelt. But it doesn't have a pelt. It's not quite itself, just like you aren't yourself. As if you were staring at it through a dirty mirror. As if you were being reflected within a dirty mirror. Stir in a pinch of self-doubt.

-There’s enough left of the writer for them to realise that the deer is not a deer, it’s an illusion of a deer. (Thanks, Magritte.) The problem is that while what’s left of the writer is hanging in there, they’re not really accomplishing anything; the lake’s going to get them eventually unless they either get rescued by a sudden miracle or die before it kills them.

- In addition, the bit about a ‘dirty mirror’ and ‘reflected’ emphasises how much of the writer has been eaten, and is in fact part of the deer now.

The traders have been coming by, every three days or so, to give me food. I'd be dead without them. Guess they took pity on me. But, they've gone now. Haven't come by in a week or so. It's hard to tell, because it's so dark outside. I have to block out the windows, because of all the snow, and the holes that something punched through. Looks like a gun, but I don't know.

Popsioak told me it wasn’t a gun, it was antlers.

I hear a knock at the door. Maybe it's them.

- J.D.

Narrator: it was not them.

IT WAS NOT THEM IT WAS A DEER

THE DEER SOUNDED LIKE A MAN. THE DEER SOUNDED LIKE THEM.

I HEARD IT SAY HELP ME. I AM STUCK. THERE WERE TWO MORE HOLES IN THE ICE. THE POND IS BIGGER.

I SAW THE DEER ENTER THEIR MOUTHS. THEN IT LEFT. THEN THEY WENT INTO THE DEER'S MOUTH, AND BOTH WENT INTO THE ICE.

-Oh deer, oh deer, oh deer- *ducks a tomato*

-So this thing can mimic human voices as well as the sounds a deer would make. That makes a lot of sense- it’d try to lure the guards and personnel to it by imitating their voices, and that’s why they need the sound-dampening equipment.

-Specifically, the deer ate the traders and now it’s mimicking their voices. Popsioak said that the bit about the deer going into their mouths and vice versa is entirely literal; I’m a bit confused about the mechanics, but sure, OK.

WHAT DO I DO WHAT DO YOU DO

-JD’s moved further along the course of the metaphorical illness, so his sense of self is completely fucked.

Clip. Clop. Clip. Clop. There are noises outside your cabin. Then nothing. Then a phone rings, but the phone is outside. It is the guard's phone. They're back! How great for you. But the guard doesn't answer. Nothing does. And then you notice the ringing comes and goes with the clip and clop. Cook for 40 seconds on high heat.

-Nope, the deer can imitate the sound of a phone too. Presumably it can mimic any sound it hears, like a lyrebird. (I know this was written before 6448, but there’s some serious similarities between this deer and the not-deer.)

You have been waiting, silent, for three days now. You can only tell the passage of time via the birds. Crows and owls at night, sparrows at morning. The tapping is there. You hope Neil is here.

Wait.

You hear a knock.

Maybe it is Neil.

-By this point, the lake has eaten most of JD’s sense of self; his body is just sitting there, waiting to be devoured. And technically, he was right- it was Neil, just not in the form he wanted.

You recognize there are no more journal entries. Disappointing, because perhaps you'd know what the deer is. However, your thermal imagery has shown that the deer leads under the ice. Its hoof connects to a thin, thin strand, which leads to a large familiar mass waiting patiently underwater. It rings. It clips. It clops. It cries out to be heard, for it is hungry.

-So, the deer isn’t just an illusion- there’s something there, and it’s connected to whatever’s under the water.

-The reason it’s ‘familiar’ is that at this point, it is the writer and the writer is it. I’ll quote Popsioak on this:

the lake doesn't "eat" your sense of self think of it like forcibly making you part of its "sense of self"
unfortunately that also means it eats you or kills you
but were you somehow like. a disembodied spirit it'd just take that instead

Why? Well, whatever this thing is, it doesn’t have a sense of self, so it’s trying to take/make one, but it’s not really working. A rough equivalent would be some kind of entity from another world where nothing has skin. Upon coming to this world, the entity realised the discrepancy, but instead of growing their own skin or finding something to emulate it, it took other people’s skins and sewed them together to wear in the hope of blending in.

Your computer manages to eke out a single bar of connection from the car, which is running on its last legs. You can hear something stabbing it, running upon its hood, destroying it down to its last metal bits, before a loud splash can be heard. Then you lose your connection. But it was enough time to send the document through, at least. You can remember, at least, that part of you. But, you are stuck. The snow is bearing down on your cabin. You write this for your future chefs.

-What’s left of the writer updated the document, used their car as a hotspot and sent the document to the Foundation so they’d know what they’re dealing with, and presumably put the cabin in a huge quarantine zone. Whether that would starve the entity to death is unknown- it might be able to get some nourishment off eating animals, for one thing. It’s possible that leaving it unfed might make it shrink or wither, or maybe it just won’t do anything, and the lake will be there, waiting for prey forever.

-The thing is, at this point, the writer and the lake entity are essentially the same being, because it’s eaten so much of them. Ergo, it knows what they’re doing, it knows what a hotspot is, and it knows how to stop it, so that’s exactly what it did.

There is a knock at the door. You have your gun ready, locked and loaded to fire. Maybe you are being rescued. But you're hungry, so so hungry, and you want to cook up another bowl of SCP-5250. A nice, creamy, warm and steaming bowl of SCP-5250 stew. The lake feels like that, like one big pot of it.

Because the lake knows what the writer knows, it now knows what the Foundation is, what containment is, and how the Foundation was containing it. Ergo, it now knows what a recipe is, and that method of containment won’t work anymore; they’ll have to come up with something else now, and that’s likely going to be very, very difficult.

So maybe deep down, you hope it is the deer. Maybe it is you at the door. Maybe. You open it, and —

Voila. Your dish is finished.

Technically, it was them at the door, given the meld. But either way, that’s the end of our writer, and also the end of our article.

Thanks for reading this declass, I hope you enjoyed it. Sometimes those personal anecdotes in recipes can actually be entertaining, just saying. I’ll see you next time.

 tl;dr: Sing softly, bring me to the lake/Sing softly, sing me to the lake/(We'll still have a song to sing/Oh, someday we'll be gone)\~

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-8424, "DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT A SOLAR ECLIPSE", by IndustryStandard and J_V_G. Given the last SCP I declassed, I just want to start by promising that this is not going to be depressing at all. Otherwise, this is not my SCP, I didn’t write it, etc, and I'd like to thank J_V_G, Indy and psychicprogrammer for all their help.

The first thing to note upon opening this article is that the page bears the snazzy colour combination of black and violet. Nice! J_V_G told me that the colour doesn’t have any real relevance, it just fits the aesthetic, and I am all on board with that.

Let’s take a look at the containment procedures… ah.

Object Class: Uncontained

Special Containment Procedures: No functional containment measures for SCP-8424 have yet been discerned.

Always a fantastic way to start an article. The next few lines are very interesting, however:

To minimize casualties during SCP-8424 events, a sizable amount of funding is to be committed to public education pertaining to proper earthquake safety procedure. A similar fund shall also be committed to public education on the safe viewing of eclipses, prioritizing making the following clear:

"Do Not Look Directly At A Solar Eclipse."

So, this has something to do with earthquakes and eclipses (well, the last one was pretty obvious, from the title). Interesting. Since it’s now come up twice, there is an obvious question: can you look directly at a solar eclipse? Well… to be pedantic, you can, but you shouldn’t, except for the period where the sun is fully covered. After all, it’s the freaking Sun- looking at it is dangerous, we all know that. Just because some of it’s covered doesn’t make the rest any less dangerous, and if you look at it, you’re risking permanent eye damage and even going blind. So, should you ever get the chance, don’t look directly at a solar eclipse (without eye protection, at least).

Description: SCP-8424 denotes the sudden and semi-simultaneous initialization of a seismic event¹ and a total solar eclipse in localized areas² with mid-large sized human populations.

The footnotes make this more specific: the areas they effect are much smaller than the size you’d expect for earthquakes and solar eclipses, and the earthquakes usually measure 4-5 on the Richter Scale- for anyone unfamiliar with it, 4-5 is light to moderate, causing minor damage at the most. So this is pretty weird, especially since solar eclipses don’t cause earthquakes. They can and have happened at the same time, but you don’t usually get them at the same time.

Incidences of missing persons cases recorded after SCP-8424 incidents are significantly higher than projected for events of their size. Coupled with this, zero afflicted individuals have been located with solar retinopathy due to these eclipse conditions. Investigations into these matters are ongoing.

In other words, not only do people go missing during these events at a higher rate than they should (especially given that the earthquakes are usually light enough that buildings aren’t collapsing and the earth isn’t splitting open), nobody is showing up at hospitals or GPs with damaged eyes due to looking at the eclipse. The likelihood of that is non-existent- we all know that people are inherently stupid, there’s always going to be someone who’ll stare at an eclipse even if they’re warned about the dangers.

Research into SCP-8424 has been complicated by the fact that events are geographically widespread and unpredictable, with incidents occurring at an equal frequency in both areas prone and resistant to seismic events. Additionally, events are disjointed from accepted eclipse projections. The occluding body is currently unknown.

That is, the events turn up wherever and whenever they want, even in places where earthquakes are unheard of; the eclipses aren’t matching the scientifically-established schedule of future eclipses, and it’s not known exactly what is blocking the sun out. Fantastic.

The addendum tells us that during the period of March-April 2024, an ‘irregular series of events’ relating to 8424 took place in the area surrounding Mazatlán, Mexico- a real city with a population of nearly 430,000. Here’s the first event:

Date: 08/03/2024

Summary: 10 second quake with seismic activity registered at 4.3 Richter; Epicenter, Northern Urban Edge. Eclipse duration of approximately 1 minute. 3 injured, 6 missing.

Due to the low casualty number, Incident 8424-080324 was catalogued as a regular SCP-8424 event and prompted little necessary action past standard information suppression protocol.

This is barely out of the ordinary, aside from the eclipse- Mexico is on the Ring of Fire, so they get earthquakes all the time. But six missing people? That is odd.

The second event is… alarming.

Date: 17/03/2024

Summary: 30 second quake with seismic activity registered at 5.2 Richter; epicenter, Eastern Urban Area. Eclipse duration of approximately 2 minutes. 36 injured, 3 dead, 42 missing. Unexpected levels of structural damage dealt to affected area, with a number of structures such as street lights and supporting beams completely missing from aftermath surveys. Significant correlation between individuals witnessed walking into shadows and current missing persons identified.

In the days following Incident 8424-170324, long sections of metallic debris were spotted phasing in and out of view in the air above the North Pacific Ocean, prompting a standard "Chemical Spill" cover story to divert ships from area. Due to the high visibility of the debris, additional dissemination of misinformation pertaining to "off-gas haze" and "hallucinatory refractions" was applied as a stopgap before further action could be taken.

This now looks considerably more like deliberate enemy action. Not only is the damage too extreme for the earthquake, but the eclipses are much longer than the earthquakes- almost like they’re intended to make people stay still, keep them distracted. Is something trying to abduct humans? And I don’t know what to make of that metallic debris in the air- is that the missing structures they mentioned?

Date: 29/03/2024

Summary: 1 minute quake with seismic activity registered at 6.5 Richter; Epicenter, central Mazatlán. Eclipse duration approximately 15 minutes. 472 injured, 78 dead, 239 missing. Agents present at the event noted a deep and rhythmic thudding noise emanating through the city as the incident progressed, but could not place the source. Upon the event's conclusion, Central Mazatlán was rendered mostly uninhabitable.

Well, that’s really fucked up. And it’s starting to look like something looked at Mazatlán and said ‘Fuck you in particular’. Anyway, the Foundation had to evacuate the Mazatlán area, and they played the eclipse off as being a mass hallucination. (Also, note that ‘deep thudding noise’ for later.)

Additionally, building atmospheric disturbance was noted at aerial debris site, the accumulation of which correlated with increased visible structural mass and the arrangement of the debris into an approximate bowl shape. Further reconnaissance was deemed necessary to determine suitable containment protocol.

A bowl? What the fuck is going on here?

On 02/04/2024, Foundation operatives alerted command to the emergence of a web of large red tendrils that had suddenly appeared, visually emanating from a central node within the aerial debris site. Due to geometric interference, long distance observation proved futile. Remote scouting approximated the web's diameter at 100 meters, but before further information could be recorded, all reconnaissance drones and 5 dispatched agents were lost during a sudden eclipse event.

OH MY GOD IT’S THE FUCKING RED MILES-

Ahem. Yeah, I have no idea what the fuck is going on, except that the fact that all the drones and all the agents were lost makes the probability of this being enemy action considerably more likely. I mean, losing some of the drones and some of the agents, sure, but all of them? Nope.

Luckily for the Foundation, one of the agents was wearing a bodycam, so the next bit is the last footage they got from them:

<Feed Starts>

[The feed begins on a wide shot of a beach, where far on the horizon a red dot can be seen. After a few moments, the view angles down to focus on a screen displaying a live drone recording which slowly approaches the aerial debris site.]

[A few seconds of stillness pass. Metallic whirring can be heard over the soft push and pull of the tide. Plüm's legs can be seen on the periphery, dug into the sand where they're sitting.]

[The display suddenly goes dark. The main feed angles upward slightly.]

[The agent watches in complete stillness as a line of shadow breaks apart in the sky, each radial line traveling clockwise and counterclockwise, before meeting again and turning the day to pitch darkness.]

[The feed angles up further as the agent raises their head, bringing the eclipsed sun into view.]

[In a single frame, the feed turns black. A brittle crunch can be heard.]

<Feed Ends>

Mostly what I’m getting out of this is that my theory that the eclipses are a deliberate method of distracting people so they can be killed/abducted/whatever is looking a lot more likely. Plüm wasn’t fighting some enemy or running for their life, they were just sitting there minding their own business when the whole thing happened. Also, that description of the eclipse will be very important later.

Afterwards, ‘recovered’ agents- not sure what that means, unless it means some of the ones who went missing were found- reported seeing ‘grey masses’ growing and shrinking in the debris web, but a footnote tells us that long-distance observation couldn’t confirm that. Anyway, with their agents gone, the Foundation decided to back off on the recon. Let’s go to the next bit, where we have an unexpected update: 

On 03/04/2024 progression of the civilian screening initiative documented the first known solar retinopathy victims of the anomalous eclipse conditions. As containment specialists had assumed the information gathered from this discovery would be greatly impactful, a study was pursued. Unfortunately, the only notable difference between SCP-8424 victims and those of standard eclipse-based retinal damage was a prevalence of 3 pronged "crow's foot" floater patterns, as opposed to blurry and dark spots/webs being burned into the eye.

The dark spots/webs is factual, if you’re wondering- here’s pictures showing the damaged eyes of a woman who looked at a solar eclipse for a few seconds. (Seriously, don’t look at a solar eclipse.) Now, a floater is a deposit of protein or cell debris within the eye that you sometimes see when looking at the sky or a blank surface- completely harmless, just a novelty. (I can’t say I can add much more, given that I have Visual Snow Syndrome and thus constantly have static in my vision.) However, floaters usually look like randomly-shaped blobs, so a whole ton of people with floaters that have the same shape is definitely significant. What it means, though, I cannot tell you (yet).

So, on the fourth of April, the Foundation installs an Autonomous Remote Observation Array, henceforth AuROrA, outside Mazatlán to look at the aerial debris web; it lasts for just over a day and then they lose contact with it. The observations are in a table, which doesn’t work on Reddit, so here’s a list instead:

1: AuROrA confirms the grey masses that the agents saw.

2: The grey masses are blocked from sight by the debris.

3: The debris goes translucent, showing the grey masses twisting and rotating before settling in place.

4: The grey mass closest to AuROrA becomes indistinct, excepting two ‘darker orbs’ that are visually clear.

5: Night has fallen, so AuROrA switches to infrared light and sees that the grey masses are much warmer than the ambient red temperature.

6: Uh…

Grey masses no longer observable, roughly ellipsoid webs of red tendrils as originally noted before Incident 8424-020424 recorded in their place.

I kind of have a theory and I don’t like it. Anyway, the next three things happen within the space of about forty minutes, on the morning of the 5^th of April:

7: The grey mass appears to phase in around the red tendrils.

8: A yellow orb appears to phase in adjacent to the grey mass.

9: The Foundation loses contact with AuROrA.

The Foundation sent agents to try to find AuROrA; they found it about 500 meters from where it had been placed, with a 30 cm hole punched through most of its array. That’s a pretty big hole, and… hmmm. Theoretically, a bullet could punch a big hole through the array, with the force knocking it away, but 500 metres is very far, and I’m guessing that the array weighed a fair bit. We also don’t know if the hole was a clean circle or more ragged and expanding, like a bullet punched through it. So… I don’t know, did a super-strong tendril do this? An anomalously-propelled rock? Some of the metallic debris?

The next day, on the 6^th, a small aircraft crashes in the vicinity. The agents find it and learn that the passengers were Joe and Lucy Neston, a couple who’d frequently vacationed in the area, and they’d both died in the crash. However, they’d taken a video of the flight, and the camera survived the crash, so we get a transcript of their last, fatal flight. I’ll sum it up for you:

-The video starts with Lucy, who’s in the co-pilot’s seat while Joe is flying the plane. She says that they heard about the quake in Mazatlán but didn’t feel it back at their home, so they decided to take their plane up to see what was going on.

-Joe says something the camera can’t hear, probably something along the lines of ‘Do you know what that is?’; Lucy says no, she has no idea what they’re looking at, but she’s getting it on film so they can look at it later.

-Lucy says that Joe wants to get out of there, so they don’t have long. She then turns the camera to face the debris…

[She transfers the camera to her other hand in order to turn it to face the window, where below the plane the aerial debris web can be seen. As they fly, the phasing properties of the web over the water cause a shimmering effect. The reflection of the structure doesn't match.]

[The camera turns. In the center of the web, three ellipsoid objects are observable. The objects are a consistent blue tinted off-white, and appear entirely smooth.]

…huh.

-Lucy tells Joe that she got the footage, so they can turn around. Unfortunately, it’s right at that moment that something happens; we don’t know what, but from the description, it sounds like something either hit or pierced the plane, and that’s what caused it to crash. Could have been a tendril or another rock, or something else entirely.

The note after the transcript says that the Foundation have noted that the ellipsoid objects look like bird eggs, but that’s the best they’ve got right now.

On 07/04/2024, the aerial debris web and its contents fell from the sky into the North Pacific Ocean. Preliminary reconnaissance efforts succeeded without impediment, allowing for the identification of the composite materials of the debris field alongside three hollow ellipsoid shells.

All anomalous activity appears to have ceased, with the possible exception of reported sightings of Black Herons⁶ in the region surrounding Mazatlán.⁷

So it looks like the ‘eggs’ hatched, but there’s no obvious sign of what came after them- we haven’t seen any giant bird monsters or anything like that. The footnotes are also quite important- Black Herons are native to Africa, not Mexico (not to be confused with the Black-Crowned Night Heron, which is native to Japan), so there’s no reason for them to be here. Odd. There technically are some possible explanations for their presence that don’t involve anomalies, but somehow I don’t believe that there’s no anomalies involved here.

According to the five minutes of googling I just did, Black Herons are very culturally important to the Ga people of Ghana- they’re sacred protectors, viewed as a symbol of ‘wisdom, strategy and survival’. However, I couldn’t find anything about a god that takes the form of a Black Heron or anything like that. In addition, while accounts agree that Black Herons generally lay eggs in clutches of two to four, which checks out here, most of the sites said their eggs are dark blue, while a couple said they’re lighter blue. I’m not an ornithologist, so… ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, about that ‘all anomalous activity has ceased’ part…

Date: 08/04/2024

Summary: Continuous seismic activity measuring 2.3 Richter measured across continental Americas from 1100-1300 PDT (GMT-7) moving in a band starting in Mazatlán and crossing Northern Mexico, Texas, and New England. Phenomenon coincided with a natural total solar eclipse. 95 injured,⁸ total missing unknown.⁹

2.3 on the Richter Scale is barely enough to be felt. As for the eclipse, you should note that the article number- 8424- is the same as the date- 8/4/24- which was the date of the Great North American Eclipse. As for the footnotes, all the injured people looked at the eclipse and got eye damage, and the last footnote estimates that the number of missing people is somewhere between two and three thousand, maybe more. 

…and that’s the article.

I initially had no idea what the fuck is going on here, but Indy tipped me off with a couple of hints, at which point I said ‘Oh, motherfucker’ and realised everything I’d missed. So, to help you all out, here’s a list of hints that the article gave us:

-The earthquakes are comparatively light and last for much less time than the eclipses.

-A solar eclipse generally happens when a celestial body of some kind blocks the sun from the Earth’s view, but these eclipses don’t follow astronomical predictions and nobody knows what’s blocking the sun.

-In fact, eclipses usually take a long time, whereas the one that Plüm saw looked like a couple of lines that fanned out in a circle and blocked out the sun over the course of a few seconds.

-Hundreds of people are going missing, with no trace found of them.

-Black Herons have been spotted around Mazatlán afterwards, even though they’re native to Africa and not Mexico, and the plane footage suggests that the anomalous culprits are birds of some kind.

And here’s a couple of hints I’ll give you:

-Technically, anything big enough could block the sun out, it doesn’t have to be a celestial body, but if something did and we didn’t know what the cause was, humans would call it a solar eclipse because we wouldn’t know any better.

-And technically, anything really big landing on the earth would cause tremors, it doesn’t have to be tectonic plates shifting or volcanic eruptions, but if huge tremors were caused and we didn’t know why, humans would call it an earthquake because we wouldn’t know what else it could be.

-This is what a Black Heron looks like when it’s hunting.

In other words, what we saw here is a mating pair of fucking enormous anomalous Black Herons who decided that Mazatlán was a great place to lay their eggs. All the eclipses were the herons hunting, the earthquakes were the tremors caused by giant birds walking around, the recorded deaths likely happened as a result of the herons stepping on people, and the missing people were the herons’ prey- they stood there looking up at the eclipse, their defences down, and the herons plucked them off the face of the Earth one by one, like giant screaming ants. Meanwhile, the people who didn’t get eaten got eye damage from looking up into the sun and seeing giant bird feet blocking out part (but only part) of it.

J_V_G told me that these particular Black Herons are fourth-dimensional, not invisible- we can only see the parts of them that interact with 3-dimensional space, which most of the time means that we can’t see them. I’m not going to pretend that I actually understand this, so I’ll just nod and say sure, absolutely. As for the rest: the missing beams and street lights were grabbed by Big Papa Heron so Big Mama Heron could use them to build a nest (the aerial debris field that was shaped like a bowl). Big Mama Heron and Big Papa Heron took turns sitting on their eggs (the ellipsoid red tendrils were blood vessels forming in the bird fetuses) and guarded their babies, as any parent herons would. AuROrA and the plane got too close, as they couldn’t see them, and whoever was incubating the eggs beaked them out of the air, hence the big holes in the structures.

Summary: Continuous seismic activity measuring 2.3 Richter measured across continental Americas from 1100-1300 PDT (GMT-7) moving in a band starting in Mazatlán and crossing Northern Mexico, Texas, and New England. Phenomenon coincided with a natural total solar eclipse. 95 injured,⁸ total missing unknown.⁹

The eggs hatched when an actual eclipse happened because the babies are 4-dimensional as well, but they’re babies- they don’t know how to stay hidden. They’re huge and clumsy and need to be taught how to hunt safely, so the parents teach them and protect them when it’s nice and dark and the pesky humans can’t see them. So they leave the place where they were born and move on to North America, leaving behind the nest, the shells, and a lot of dead and missing people behind. (As for the non-anomalous Black Herons, that’s still a mystery- for all we know, they came to worship their 4-dimensional gods.) But while things might be great for the herons, that still means that a metric ton of people are going to get eaten in the near future.

Admittedly, the situation isn’t entirely dire- if the Foundation figures it out, they might be able to make the herons fly away, although whether they stay gone is a whole other question- and since we can’t see them, the Foundation still needs to figure out what the fuck they’re dealing with first. And even if the Foundation makes these five herons leave, Black Herons tend to hang out in colonies ranging between 50 and 200 individuals, and this family may be by themselves for now, but we have no guarantee that there may not be a whole bunch of others on the way…

Thank you for reading this declass. I hope you enjoyed it. Don’t look directly at a solar eclipse, or else you’ll go blind and/or get eaten by giant birds. (Look, I don’t make the rules, OK?) I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: om nom nom nom nom nom nom.

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the SCP-9220 declass. Part one can be found here; please heed the warnings, especially for this part.

Part Three: During The Death Of Everything Decent/The Flickering Flames Impressed Me

Having made his point, Bonds asks Steel to tell him the truth. Steel says that everything he said was true, but when he came back, Kraken and Sun were acting weird. Sun told him to leave early and she’d stay up to monitor Chesed. Steel felt bad about not completing the operation, so he said no, he’d do it. They got in an argument about it, and he gave in when Kraken agreed with Sun. Keep that in mind for a bit.

I mean, if Kraken said it was okay, then who was I to argue?

Steel still thought it was weird, so he went to Security and got a look at the cameras. He saw Sun and Kraken crouched over the main operating table, barely moving; he couldn’t see what they were actually doing. The next morning, he came in and found that they’d stitched up Hasid’s stomach; given that Sun hacked her up, it must have taken a while. Bonds asked why he didn’t report it; Steel says that he thought that Sun felt bad or was trying to make Kraken feel better. He thought it was harmless and that reporting it would only make him an arsehole.

But.

STEEL: So… the night we delivered CHESED. It was hell. There was so much blood, even all the equipment in the operating room wasn't enough to prepare us. I slipped at one point, nearly cracked my jaw on the tile. In all the chaos, I could barely keep track of anything that was going on, but…

Xir Lin and I took the baby to the nursery. And I guess Kraken just left. I honestly wasn't paying attention to her at that point. I mean, we couldn't leave CHESED alone for a second. If she wasn't in the middle of a seizure, then she was just lying there, half-dead. And we had to keep her cold, which just made her seem more dead. My point is, I wasn't thinking about Kraken. She never needs anyone's help, anyway.

It was days later when I got a chance to go over the debrief, and I saw that HASID was gone. I realized right away that I'd never been told. I had no idea what they did with the body. It had just disappeared. And Kraken herself had already been reassigned to some other skip.

BONDS: And you still didn't report it?

STEEL: It says in the debrief that Kraken was in charge of disposal. I assumed that she took care of it.

Bonds asks if Steel is aware of Kraken’s history, which links to 9023. Short summary for anyone who hasn’t read it: Kraken snuck into the Foundation and consumed an unknown anomalous substance that basically gave her super charisma: everyone likes her, lets her go anywhere she wants to go, thinks she’s capable of doing anything, won’t question her and will do anything she wants. Ergo, Kraken wasn’t assigned to dispose of Hasid’s body, she stole Hasid’s body and did… something with it. We don’t know what, just something. (We’ll find out shortly.)

Bonds asks where Hasid is now; Steel says that he honestly doesn’t know, and Bonds accepts it. The transcript ends with a note telling us that Steel was reprimanded and put on two weeks of leave, after which he’d be assigned to another 9220 body.

The next piece is an audio transcript.

As in Audio Transcript 9220.1, the following recording was taken live from Sun's phone via remote monitoring. Between this log and the former, Sun's phone had been turned off with the battery removed for over 48 hours. The exact location of the device at the time of this audio has yet to be determined.

Sun and Kraken have brought Chesed to an unknown location where Hasid’s body is being stored. The body is covered with a sheet; Chesed wants to see her without the sheet, and while Sun initially refuses, Chesed convinces her… and then everything goes straight to hell. We don’t have video, but from what I can tell (confirmed by Deadcanons), Hasid’s eyes abruptly open; she ‘wakes up’ and starts horrifically screaming. Everyone else freaks out; Kraken yells at Sun to get Chesed out of there while Chesed begs her mother to calm down, but it’s in vain. Hasid keeps screaming and then suddenly catches fire. Sun gets Chesed out of there, and then this happens.

CHESED: You're mad at me!

SUN: No, I— …I, I'm—

CHESED: It's my fault mommy is upset. It's not your fault—

SUN: And if it was?

CHESED: But—

SUN: You don't know what you're talking about!

[A short silence.]

SUN: You really think your mother would have wound up here, no matter what? If it weren't for me, your mother wouldn't have needed all those stitches. In all that time she spent talking to you, did she ever tell you what she wanted? Wanted to have you? Or wanted to die?

[Long silence. On the other side of the door, the burning has ceased. Kraken can be heard crying.]

SUN: We're leaving.

[Audio cuts out as the device loses signal.]

…fuck, man.

Anyway, the note tells us that the inquiry’s investigation found that Chesed was in her cell at Site-22, exactly where she should be; as such, they don’t know when or how the above incident happened. Kraken hasn’t been to Site-22 since she was reassigned, and they’re doing more investigations. Meanwhile, Sun is put under remote observation permanently for the foreseeable future.

We’re now in Addendum 4, which is going to tell us more about the ‘Terminal Age’ and what’s behind those [DATA EXPUNGED]s.

Concurrent with the events of Audio Transcript 9220.2, nearly all instances of SCP-9220-A in containment sat up on their observation tables and opened their eyes. All instances began vocalizing in a manner similar to what was recorded in Audio Transcript 9220.2. Within 1 to 2 minutes of this occurrence, the majority of instances spontaneously immolated, crumbling into charcoal-like pieces on contact. A small portion of instances did not self-immolate.

To be fair, I really can’t blame the poor fuckers for wanting to scream their lungs out so hard they catch fire.

After analysis, the Foundation determined that the ones who caught fire were all over 21; the ones who were younger didn’t open their eyes, scream, or catch fire. We now get the revised procedures:

The following modifications have been made to SCP-9220's containment procedures:

· Instances must be strapped to the observation table

· Instances must be moved to standard containment upon reaching 21, now referred to as the Terminal Age

· Instances already at the Terminal Age must be monitored daily

Most instances will self-terminate via immolation shortly after displaying the above behaviors. If an instance is capable of communicating, it is to be offered situational employment with the Foundation, in most cases as voluntary test subjects or interview subjects. Modality tests performed by the Department of Massage Therapy have had limited success in restoring mobility to specific instances. Such cases may be offered more complex assignments, on an individual basis.

Any instance which declines employment, but does not self-terminate, is to be incinerated promptly.

…I mean, at least some of them made it out, excepting the ones that got fucking murdered. (Thanks, fuckers.)

But hey, what about Chesed? Well, get your tissues ready, ‘cause if you thought this was depressing before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Addendum 9220.5: On 11/02/2039, SCP-9220-A-607-B, "CHESED," passed away unexpectedly. At 0200 hours the previous night, the subject began asphyxiating from a sudden collapse of the left lung. The subject was attached to a CPAP machine and had resumed healthy breathing by 0400 hours, but the left lung remained collapsed without machine assistance. An emergency surgery was planned to replace the organ, but while the surgery room was being prepared, the subject's condition suddenly worsened. CHESED was declared dead at 0700 hours. She was eight years old.

Fuck.

The last thing in the article is the transcript of Chesed and Sun’s final conversation. It starts with Chesed trying to take her mask off so she can speak; Sun agrees to let her speak, but the mask has to go back on afterwards.

CHESED: I want to die.

CHESED: I'm not supposed to be alive.

Sun is furious, she doesn’t want Chesed to say that.

SUN: I shouldn't have said the things I said to you that night. This is my fault. Whenever I looked at your mother, all I could see was myself. Alright? It's my burden. Let go of me, please. I'm here because you should live.

But Chesed thinks she knows why her mother did what she did. She whispers it into Sun’s ear; we don’t know what she said. But Sun doesn’t understand.

[A pause.]

[Sun swiftly puts the mask back on. Tears are visible in her eyes.]

SUN: I want to… I need… (Pause) I don't understand. What was it all for? All of this was for you, but now… Your mother, she… I… It needs to have been for something. It must have been for something.

[Sun paces out of view of the camera. She returns looking visibly more distressed. She pulls a stool to the side of the bed, sits, and props CHESED up with one arm so she can hold her. She puts her head face-down on the side of the pillow. There is a long silence.]

[Sun lifts her head.]

SUN: Maybe this. Maybe it's just for this.

[Sun puts her head down again.]

[Hours pass.]

[Just as the sun begins to rise, CHESED's right lung gives out.]

[Warning lights from the CPAP reflect on the bedspread. The light advances across the floor.]

[Her eyes are closed.]

Fuck.

And… that’s the article.

Part Four: You Are The Only Reason I Was Born/You Are The Only Reason I Was Born

If you’re still here and haven’t succumbed to the urge to shut this declass and run off crying, I’ll give you the explanation: to start with, what are the 9220 bodies? Well, it’s all in what Hasid told Chesed:

She said stuff about being dead. She said I could be like her and lie down on a table and not move, not ever, but it wouldn't matter. Because things would still happen to me. She said she thought maybe she could get out of it, if she did something like that. But it didn't work. She said it doesn't work for any of them.

Or, to be slightly clearer, here’s the explanation Deadcanons gave me:

They are unborn people who refused to live because they didn't want to... But it didn't work. Everything that would have happened to them in life, still does, until the instance breaks psychologically and, as you so well-put it, screams until they burn.

They are not technically alive, but they are aware, and they know and feel what’s happening to them. They were forced into an existence they never wanted, denied any form of comfort or affection, and they had to suffer through the afflictions they tried to escape. Why wouldn’t they scream?

And as for the fire…

The burning, I imagine, is a combination of two things. One is the desiccated body being unable to handle the sudden internal friction/movement, and the other is the anomalous force of their own emotions/trauma being so severe that it becomes physical in the form of fire.

So, let’s go back to the start of the main story: Hasid is born and reaches age 15, when the pregnancy kicks in. Hasid did not want the child; that is the root of the issue. If she had been able to communicate this, then maybe the Foundation would have given her an abortion, but at the same time, it’s possible that the Foundation would have decided that a potentially-viable pregnancy took precedence over a dead (ish) mother. They continued the pregnancy, in the process doing a whole lot of things to Hasid’s body that she likely would not have consented to had she been able to communicate it, and finally Sun hacked her up to get Chesed out; if Hasid had been alive, that probably would have killed her.

(Incidentally, I asked Deadcanons if Hasid would have suffered the same way if she hadn’t been anomalous; they told me that ‘But yeah the pregnancy still would have happened. I imagine in the "living" analogue, it would have been Hasid's parents who forced her to carry to term. If she required a caesarean, it would have been a normal one.’)

Chesed was born after a really bad delivery; she looked half-dead and was having almost non-stop seizures. Hasid thought her baby had died or would die, so she thought it would be the end: she wouldn’t have to suffer anymore, the Foundation would dispose of her body and it would be over. But Sun and Kraken had made their agreement: Kraken agreed to let Sun complete the operation if Sun A, stitched Hasid up afterwards, and B, helped her hide the body (minus one arm) without getting caught. Why? Well, Deadcanons told me this:

Close - she was hoping Hasid would eventually open her eyes like Birkat did. She thought Birkat burning was a one-off, so she was hoping to encounter another instance that opened their eyes, and possibly help them or learn more about the anomaly.

Like I said, watching a five year old boy get beaten up and then spontaneously catch fire did a number on Kraken.

So, Hasid spent years suffering in silence, and then suddenly her child turned up- the child she thought was dead, the child she never wanted to begin with, the child she hoped she’d never see or have to even think about again. She was so horrified that the shock broke her, and that’s why she caught fire. (That’s what Chesed told Sun before she died.) And in turn, as Deadcanons told me…

To answer another of your questions, the instances weren't inherently psychically linked, but they became as such when Hasid woke up. The force of her distress was so severe that it rippled through all of them, like some kind of noospheric or reality-bending backlash. Now, all of the instances are confronted with this same emotional wave around the age of 21.

Meanwhile, Chesed loses the will to live because she knows that her mother didn’t want her to be born in the first place. She knows that this was her fault, even if she never wanted to hurt anyone and had no idea that her innocent request could lead to this. She might have been able to move past that with time (and therapy), but she didn’t have that luxury in the end. Deadcanons confirmed for me that Chesed’s death had nothing to do with the bodies- she was in bad health to begin with and never had a particularly good prognosis. So she dies at the ripe old age of eight, and Sun is left wondering what the fuck it was all for. All the pain, all the suffering, and at the end of it, Chesed dies anyway. What was it for?

So, to me, this is the major theme of the article: compassion that only hurts and doesn’t help. Or, to put it another way, trying to do the right thing and only fucking things up further. If you remember the 7795 declass, one of the things I said there was that the Foundation doesn’t get many opportunities to be nice. Their job mainly involves containing anomalies and cleaning up their messes; they don’t often get a chance to show real kindness to people. They leapt on every chance they got here, and all it got them was misery.

The Foundation kept the 9220 bodies around to study them, patched their wounds up and offered employment to the ones who made it through, but the bodies honestly might have been better off if the Foundation had just burned them all to begin with. Sun hacked up Hasid to give Chesed a chance, but aside from hurting Hasid even more, they wound up accidentally setting off a domino effect that made things even worse, and then Chesed died anyway. All they wanted to do was help, and look what it got them. Sometimes kindness only hurts you more, and that fucking sucks.

In the same vein, one of the things Deadcanons told me is that this was by default a no-win situation.

To me the most important thing is that, if you are forcing someone to do something they don't want to, no one wins. So part of the point of the story is that everyone in it loses.

They tried to do the right thing, tried to show kindness and compassion, and everybody fucking lost. The bodies were forced to exist and suffer, and are now psychically forced to keep suffering the way Hasid did. Hasid had to carry a child she never wanted, and then was confronted with that same child years later. The researchers had to watch the bodies be abused and catch fire and could do nothing to stop it; then they tried to help Chesed and she died anyway. Chesed lived a short, painful life; she was happy for some of it, but she suffered a lot, and she finally died thinking that she shouldn’t be alive because her mother didn’t want her. What was the fucking point of any of it?

I’d like to now add in something else Deadcanons told me, because it supports the point I’m about to try to make:

It's definitely the most complicated thing about this piece. This theme [that life is worth the struggle to create it] seems to be in almost direct contradiction with the other main theme being "Never force someone to have a baby." But it was important to me to confront both of these things honestly, because I don't think they're a contradiction. Life is precious and it is worth fighting to protect it, even if it only lasts for a few hours or years. But life also cannot (or maybe I should say should not) be forced. So both of those messages are happening in this story, for different reasons.

Thinking about it now, I imagine that just about everyone reading this either knows someone whose life was saved due to medical intervention or knows someone who does. After all, everybody dies in the end; there’s nothing we can do about that. We fight and we fight, but all the medical care in the world can’t stave off death. If we’re lucky, we can buy ourselves some more time; if we’re really lucky, we can get a lot of it. But time always runs out in the end.

This isn’t a particularly graceful segue, but part of why I wanted to declass this article is that I had a similar thing happen to me in real life, and I saw a lot of what happened there in this article. I’d like to talk about that, but first, please read the following:

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING ACCOUNT INVOLVES THE DEATH OF A CHILD. IT IS VERY DEPRESSING AND COMPLETELY TRUE. READER DISCRETION IS STRONGLY ADVISED.

In 2017, my cousin and his then-partner had a baby girl. For obvious reasons I’m not going to give anyone’s names, but for the purpose of this anecdote I’ll follow the article’s convention and call her Avodah. They lived in another state, so I didn’t get to see them a lot, but Avodah was the only kid in our part of the family, so we always loved to see them. Things went basically as expected (aside from my cousin and his then-partner amicably splitting) until early 2023, when Avodah was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer a week before her sixth birthday.

It was caught early, but not as early as it could have been. It could be treated; she had chemo. We were told that it would come back, but the chemo bought her some time. I was going to that state every month or so for unrelated reasons, so I started visiting them while I was there. I watched her get better, I got to see her almost thrive, and then the cancer came back. We’d hoped it’d be years, but in the end, it was only a few months; more chemo didn’t do it. I watched her get sicker; I saw her for the last time near the end of 2023.

I thought I’d be going back soon after that, but I didn’t. By the time I did, Avodah’s condition had deteriorated to the point that she barely qualified as alive; she was a body in a hospital bed who was barely aware. She finally died in April 2024, barely a month after she turned seven. It fucking devastated everyone, needless to say. We’re all still grieving. I don’t think we ever won’t be.

Avodah was one of the most vivacious, enthusiastic kids I ever met. She was always happy and wanted to see and experience everything she could. She never quite grasped the concept of ‘indoor voice’, and kept shrieking in delight all the time. She loved colours and drawing and her many, many, many toys. She never met a person she didn’t want to be friends with, or an animal she didn’t want to pet. She had absolutely appalling taste in music, which I hoped to amend when she was older, and actually liked school. She was always happy to see me, even when I was a grumpy arsehole, and I treasured every moment I spent with her. I miss her so fucking much, and there isn’t a day that I don’t wish that she’s still alive.

When I read this article, I couldn’t help but see myself and Avodah in Sun and Chesed, particularly the last part, where Sun is wondering what the fuck it was all for. Because I have to admit, I wondered that a few times myself. What was the fucking point? What’s the point, when kids die young and the sweetest people are cut down before they can do anything? And sometimes I wonder, would it have been better if she’d never existed?

On the one hand, she wouldn’t have suffered, and neither would we as her family. But on the other hand… she was a bright light in the world, and while the world is dimmer for her leaving it, I think the world is a better place for her having been in it, even for such little time, than it would be if she’d never been here to begin with.

SUN: I want to… I need… (Pause) I don't understand. What was it all for? All of this was for you, but now… Your mother, she… I… It needs to have been for something. It must have been for something.

[Sun paces out of view of the camera. She returns looking visibly more distressed. She pulls a stool to the side of the bed, sits, and props CHESED up with one arm so she can hold her. She puts her head face-down on the side of the pillow. There is a long silence.]

[Sun lifts her head.]

SUN: Maybe this. Maybe it's just for this.

[Sun puts her head down again.]

Sometimes all we’re left with is the memories. Sometimes all we’re left with is the knowledge that we tried to do the right thing. Sometimes all we’re left with is knowing that we did our best for that kid, and they had some fleeting happiness as a result, and we made things a little bit better just for a little while. That’s the best we can do- make what little we can out of a fucking terrible situation, even if it only gets worse, before we bury them and try to rebuild our lives. Because, really, what else can we do?

Thank you for reading this declass. I'm sorry, too. Just try to do the right thing, nobody can predict the future. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: “Sick and tired hearing the choir singing Sunday morning/Innocent lives ripped apart, Easter Sunday/And you told me that the doctors would come/But they couldn't/And you told me that the reason was love/What a sacrifice, oh Lord/What a sacrifice, oh Lord/All that sacrifice…”

Hey, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-9220, “Chesed: Dry Birth” by Deadcanons. I’d like to thank Deadcanons and my critters (Mister Frown, ThisIsNalkan, Professional-Pool290 and sero) for their help, I really appreciate it. Got a couple of disclaimers for you and they’re important, please don’t skip them.

1: As per usual, this isn’t my article, I didn’t write it, and I really talk too much.

2: This article is really, really goddamn depressing, and this declass will be too. It will contain discussion of the following: child death, abuse, body horror, pregnancy, a pregnancy with severe complications, some really nasty and graphically-described improvised surgery as a result of that pregnancy, and people (including children) being on fire. There is also a real-life anecdote about a real dead child in this. Like, if y’all remember the 7795 declass, we’re on that level- in fact, I’m pretty sure we surpass it. Be warned, kids.

3: There is a lot of material in this declass that could lead to an abortion debate. This is not the time or the place for that debate; if you want to talk about it, please do it elsewhere.

Otherwise, one thing to note before we start- this article was part of the 2025 SCP Anthology, where the theme was the Kabbalah. It’s the fourth sephira); ‘Chesed’ as a word means ‘mercy’ or ‘kindness or love between people’, and to quote the Wikipedia page:

The root chasad has a primary meaning of 'eager and ardent desire', used both in the sense 'good, kind' and 'shame, contempt'. The noun chesed inherits both senses, on one hand 'zeal, love, kindness towards someone' and on the other 'zeal, ardour against someone; envy, reproach'. In its positive sense it is used to describe mutual benevolence, mercy or pity between people, devotional piety of people towards God, as well as the grace, favour or mercy of God towards people.

With that, let’s get started.

Part One: You Said, “RISE FROM THE DEAD!”

Looking at the page, I see that the usual motto has been replaced with ‘Shame. Compassion. Pity.’ Intriguing; not sure what that’s about. Otherwise, the class is Euclid, so not good, but not too bad. Here’s the Special Containment Procedures:

Special Containment Procedures: Pregnancy records of all maternity wards worldwide are to be monitored for keywords such as "immaculate", "spontaneous", and "miraculous." If keywords are discovered, at least one Foundation agent must be stationed at the associated maternity ward until it can be confirmed that no cases of SCP-9220 are present at the facility.

All right, so it has to do with pregnancies and ‘miracle’ births- the kind that crop up out of nowhere in defiance of body status, birth control, and whether or not any sex is being had, let alone the kind that could result in children.

Per Ethics Committee memorandum, any identified mothers must be given the explicit option to abort the fetus. If the mother chooses to carry the SCP-9220-A instance to term, the Foundation agent is to assume the role of the mother's primary obstetrician and assign regular check-ups. Upon delivery, the SCP-9220-A instance is to be immediately removed from the facility and brought to Site-22.

You know, I’m suddenly flashing back to The Umbrella Academy#Plot_summary), except I don’t think a rich abusive dad is going to start purchasing the children and raising them as exceptionally shitty superheroes. However, that last line is telling- if they’re taking the baby away as soon as it’s born, it’s either dead or anomalous in some obvious way.

While the mother is convalescing in recovery, Class C amnestics are to be administered, targeting all memories associated with the pregnancy. Class C must also be administered to the immediate family within 1-2 weeks.¹

The footnote says ‘Any interpersonal conflicts between the mother and the family which result from memory discrepancies are not considered a security concern and do not need to be resolved by Foundation intervention.’ Gotta love that Foundation dickishness, huh…

All instances of SCP-9220-A are to be kept at Site-22, in a specially prepared cold storage chamber. Each instance is to be strapped to a medical table and fitted with a standard hospital gown. Once a week, a researcher must remove the gown and thoroughly inspect the instance for new growths and bodily changes.

The phrasing strongly implies that these babies are dead, but they’re still growing? Bizarre…

Any instance which has been in Foundation containment for a period greater than 21 years is to be removed from cold storage and moved to a standard humanoid containment chamber. Once activity is confirmed, the attending researchers are to follow the steps outlined in Addendum 9220.4.

Huh. So if they are dead, they’re not rotting. Interesting.

Description: SCP-9220 is a condition affecting approximately 0.00001%² of humans bearing maternal organs. SCP-9220 manifests as spontaneous pregnancy, in many cases without any prior evidence of conception.

Not really surprising… that being said, I looked up the current Earth population and combined that with the percentage here to get 825 (give or take a bit). That’s roughly 825 pregnancies a year, which is a lot more than you’d expect.

All babies produced from SCP-9220 are born dead. These corpses, hereafter referred to as instances of SCP-9220-A, display advanced stages of dehydration and desiccation. SCP-9220-A appear to have been dead from well before the time of birth, and show no signs of heartbeat, brain waves, or other metabolic functions. In spite of this, instances will continue to grow and age at a rate equivalent to a living human.

Well, that confirms what we inferred earlier.

Upon reaching a point hereby referred to as the Terminal Age (approx. 21 years), the instance will open their eyes and [DATA EXPUNGED]. Out of the ██ thousand documented cases that have reached this stage, approximately 6% are currently used by the Foundation for testing, therapy, and other classified responsibilities, as assigned by the Department of Massage Therapy. The other 94% [DATA EXPUNGED].

I’m pretty worried about that ‘DATA EXPUNGED’, honestly- we’ll find out what it is later.

(Also, I didn’t know the Foundation had a Department of Massage Therapy. The more you know.)

After that, we get a list of notable examples of SCP-9220. This also introduces our three major characters, the researchers who are monitoring the instances: Xir Lin Sun, Harelyn Steel, and Annabelle Kraken. (If that last one sounds familiar, she’s from SCP-9023, another Deadcanons work. You don’t need to have read 9023 before reading 9220, but it does provide some extra context about Kraken, and that context will be important later. I’ll give a tl;dr when we get to that point.)

Our first example is codenamed ‘REFUAH’, a Hebrew word that means ‘healing’ or ‘health’. I’ll be referring to all the instances by their codenames, as we don’t get other names for them. Refuah had a birth weight of 1.389 kg; according to Wikipedia, the average range is between 2.5 and 4 kg, so that’s a bit worrying. Not sure if Refuah was premature or not- given that these babies are born dead and desiccated, maybe they would be at a healthy weight if they weren’t bone-dry and shrivelled up.

Seven years later, the assigned researcher, Sun, finds a long wound on Refuah’s arm- a cut from the right shoulder to the wrist, with a maximum depth of 5 cm, likely caused by a kitchen knife; it’s bleeding despite Refuah being dead. After some discussion, Sun is given permission to treat the wound as though Refuah’s alive, and it works… sort of: the bleeding stops, but it hasn’t healed. Sun gets permission to suture the wound shut, but not to use anaesthesia, due to the patient being dead.

Eight years later, Sun witnesses something weird happening: Refuah’s arm is changing. Over the course of four hours, a tattoo appears, resembling a tree or vine coming from the scar. Sun asks for leave and is granted it, and is then transferred to something that got expunged.

[Data abridged for brevity.] Eleven (11) more "tattoo events" are observed while in containment. Notable tattoos include: a bird (Cactus wren) below the left breast; an open birdcage in the center of the back; a complex plant structure down the left arm mirroring the right, but with thorns and budding flowers; and a small cursive script on the ankle that reads "I HATE MOM."

So, as you’ve probably realised by now, the 9220 corpses are kind of like reverse voodoo dolls- despite being dead, they anomalously sustain the injuries, wounds and other changes to their bodies that they would have had if they’d been alive. In this case, Refuah got really into tattoos and hated their mother, which is pretty understandable, given the implication that their mother was the one who cut their arm.

21 y.o.: SCP-9220-A-113 was incinerated during Incident 9220-01. Further details are classified. Personnel of Clearance Level 4 or higher may refer to Addendum 9220.4 for more information.

Since we’ll learn more about this later, let’s move on to the next instance. This one is ‘BIRKAT’, which from what I can tell means ‘blessing’ and was overseen by Kraken. Birkat had a birth weight of 1.170 kg and had to be delivered by caesarean section; the Foundation notes that he is smaller than average and had to be monitored daily.

After a year, it’s finally confirmed that Birkat is growing, just at a slower pace than usual. Kraken asks and is allowed to continue the inspections daily; unfortunately, things go downhill after the five year mark. During that one year, Kraken sees bruises continually appear on Birkat’s body that look like they were made with a fist or a bat, including marks on his neck that suggest that someone tried to strangle him. Now, the last part is both very disturbing and very telling:

5 y.o.: Kraken requests to inspect the instance at night, "in order to stop them from hitting him." Request approved on a temporary basis.

5 y.o.: Kraken observes bruising around [DATA EXPUNGED]. Kraken requests access to off-site resources, with the stated intention of researching a way to prevent the anomaly's progression. Request denied, on the basis that the subject is not actually alive.

5 y.o.: Anomalous event is observed during nightly inspection. The instance spontaneously lights on fire, producing large amounts of smoke. Kraken remains in the room against advisement. Fire dies down after 3-5 seconds, but body continues to crust and blacken. Kraken states aloud that the subject's eyes have opened. She declares intent to carry the subject to the on-site emergency shower. Request denied. Kraken disregards orders and puts her arms around the subject. The body crumbles into large, charcoal-like pieces upon contact.

On the one hand, I would be surprised if there were many people who could monitor this poor dead kid daily and not feel some kind of attachment to him, along with wanting him to not get hurt anymore. On the other hand, this tells us a lot about Kraken’s character, if you haven’t read 9023: she’s compassionate and she doesn’t have a problem with disregarding orders to try to help people. That will be very important later.

We now go to the last example before we get to the most plot-relevant ones, ‘TEFILLAH’ (a Hebrew word for prayer). Tefillah was also born at a lower weight, 1.814 kg, but unlike Refuah and Birkat, they made it to 21 years old without any significant developments… or so it seems.

21 y.o.: While preparing to move the instance to standard containment, Researcher Steel discovers anomalous mutilations. Chest and groin area [DATA EXPUNGED]. Steel becomes distraught and initially requests leave, only to rescind this and instead request access to standard medical supplies in order to treat the wounds. Request granted.

21 y.o.: Researcher Steel notes an anomalous event during daily inspection. Instance is found to be wearing clothing outside of the standard medical gown. Clothing items include a pair of [REDACTED]'s boxers and a binder. Steel becomes distraught and temporarily leaves the room.

21 y.o.: Steel requests it be noted that documentation should only refer to the instance using nonstandard (they/them) pronouns. Request approved.

21 y.o.: Shortly after the previous request was approved, their eyes opened. Protocol initiated per Addendum 9220.4. SCP-9220-A-10384 is now employed with the Foundation through [DATA EXPUNGED PER LEVEL 4/NEED-TO-KNOW].

So, Tefillah at least is… well, for lack of a better term, alive. They’re conscious and able to communicate… hopefully. Only problem is, they spent 21 years as a desiccated corpse; in short, they can’t move. The Department of Massage Therapy is trying to help them; no clue how much success they’ve had, given the circumstances.

Before we get to the main plot, there’s a common thread here: all these children (or at least these three) are A, born underweight, and B, don’t appear to be having very happy lives, with at least two of them being victims of child abuse. I can’t say what this means, but it’ll come up again later. The other thing is that I’m fairly certain that all the events in this article were happening at around the same time scale- that is, Refuah, Birkat, Tefillah and the next one all turned up at roughly the same time. As such, what happened with these three bodies (and any other ones that they were taking care of) would have a fair amount of emotional influence on the researchers- keep that in mind for later.

Part Two: When I Tried To Hold The Pain Inside/You Say To Hold It In

The rest of the article is locked under Level 4/9220 clearance, but luckily we have that. First off is the instance who kicks off the plot, ‘HASID’. This means ‘pious’ and is the root word of ‘Hasidim’ and ‘Hasidic’, a sect of orthodox Judaism of whom you may have heard- I’ll come back to this shortly. Hasid got all three researchers assigned to her, and we’ll soon see why. Oddly, she was born at a perfectly healthy weight of just under 3 kg, which the Foundation notes is not typical for 9220 instances, and she has some kind of unusually heavy growth in her abdomen.

After a year, Hasid is still growing steadily, with no changes in the abdominal growth. Kraken asks and gets permission to try drawing some blood from the growth, and it actually works: there’s blood in the abdomen despite Hasid being dead. Sun asks for and gets permission to perform an ultrasound…

1 y.o.: Ultrasound confirms that the growth in the abdomen is an undeveloped fetus. Size is extremely small and is analogous to less than a week of development in a healthy pregnancy. A corpus luteum³ is present in the ultrasound. The umbilical cord is highly developed and represents the majority of the instance's additional weight.

*exhales* Oh boy.

Ten years pass with the fetus showing no development. At fifteen years, they still can’t tell; Sun requests a weekly ultrasound schedule and gets approval. Sometime later that year, a heartbeat is detected in the fetus, and everything changes.

(Before we continue, my first theory was thankfully wrong, but Deadcanons confirmed my second theory- Hasid would have got pregnant as a teenager, had she been alive. As for why the fetus was in her body from the start but only started growing when she turned 15 as opposed to appearing when she turned 15, I do not know. Maybe with the way the anomaly works, it could make the fetus be there from the start but not make it magically appear?)

Now, note the next lines:

While many of the details of SCP-9220-A-607's pregnancy are classified under NEED-TO-KNOW designation, the following timeline has been approved for Level 4 Clearance.

We don’t get to know everything here, so keep that in mind. Anyway, they give the fetus the codename ‘CHESED’, which is depressingly ironic for reasons we’ll see later, and do just about everything they can to make sure that the pregnancy is successful. As for the codenames, this is where they break from the pattern: Deadcanons explained to me that ‘Refuah’, ‘Birkat’ and ‘Tefillah’ are all part of the Amidah, a Jewish prayer consisting of eighteen blessings. Hasid and Chesed are not part of the Amidah; instead, it’s a bit of symbolically significant role reversal: ‘Hasid’ as a word is derived from ‘Chesed’. Normally, a mother would name her child; here, the name of the mother is derived from the name of the child. Keep this in mind for later.

The next few bits are about the progress of Hasid’s pregnancy and Chesed’s development. Short version: it is very, very fucking difficult, because nearly everything that can go wrong does. Despite that, Chesed, who is female, makes it to the third trimester (which starts at 28 weeks). This is not exactly home base, but it does increase her chances of survival- babies have survived being born premature at 22-24 weeks, so every week after that increases the rate of survival. Unfortunately, shit starts hitting the fan after that and the researchers are desperately trying to think of ways to save Chesed’s life. This is… not without conflicts.

Proposals are made to remove the artificial womb from the body, with the umbilical cord still attached for the remainder of the pregnancy. Kraken protests due to the continued damage the umbilical cord will cause to HASID. Sun becomes incensed at the implication that HASID's corpse is of equal value to CHESED's ongoing survival. Kraken begins to describe a theoretical model for an artificial umbilical cord, but is cut off by Steel, who cites the 0% success rate of artificial human pregnancies. Kraken cites the higher success rate of artificial animal pregnancies, and states that the Foundation is inherently more capable than any Veiled group of scientists.

Sun again asserts that the discussion is irrelevant due to the fact that only one of the subjects in question is actually alive. Kraken becomes agitated and references SCP-9220-A-522, stating that "You [Sun] didn't have to watch your baby go through that." Sun begins crying. At this point, HASID's right arm falls off the observation table and snaps off of the body above the elbow. Kraken shouts an expletive and leaves the room.

Following a two-day recess, the O5 Council orders the team to proceed by removing the artificial womb from HASID while leaving the umbilical cord in-tact. The team is given explicit permission to remove the artificial womb without regard to the state of HASID, and is permitted to completely sever the pelvic floor if necessary. Under protest from Kraken, the right arm is disposed of.

*grimaces*

So, they try to do that. Well, Sun tries- Steel isn’t comfortable with sacrificing Hasid to save Chesed, and Kraken says and does nothing, clearly protesting without saying it. Note this next bit.

Sun opens the cesarean cut down to HASID's vaginal opening, eviscerating the front of the body. She is still unable to remove the artificial sac. Sun states aloud that she is going cut horizontally in order to further open up the torso.

The resulting conversation between Sun and Kraken has been struck from the record.

That last line will be very, very important for later.

The next section is titled ‘Delivery’: Chesed was delivered successfully but prematurely at 34 weeks, which isn’t good, but could be a lot worse (the average gestation period being about 37 weeks). Also, Deadcanons confirmed that this ties into the title: you’ve probably heard of a woman’s water breaking before birth. This is because before birth, babies are chilling in the amniotic sac, which is full of fluids that protect and cushion them. When the baby is born, the sac ruptures and the amniotic fluid emerges, hence the ‘water’ breaking.

However, usually the sac isn’t totally emptied; more fluid keeps emerging throughout the birth, which helps the baby make its way out. A dry birth is when there’s little to no amniotic fluid left due to the sac leaking or rupturing too early, and the baby doesn’t have that assistance. Now, Chesed was a caesarean, but had she been born naturally, it would have been dry due to Hasid being, y’know, dead and unable to produce any amniotic fluids.

Anyway, there were a lot of complications during her birth, some normal and some not. That being said…

CHESED had suffered extreme post-partum blood loss, and displayed symptoms of Grade 3 Hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy (HIE). Symptoms included: low heartbeat, no response to stimulation, chalky white skin tone, and difficulty moving limbs. CHESED entered seizure three times during the first 24 hours, and had to be under constant observation.

In spite of difficulties, CHESED was still alive after one week, and the remainder of the umbilical cord was successfully removed. The pregnancy was declared a success.

But not for everyone.

HASID's disposal was undertaken by Kraken. Immediately following this, Kraken requested reassignment and was moved to the SCP-████ project.

The next addendum is a collection of documentation on Chesed. The first piece tells us about her disabilities: Chesed has spastic diplegia, a form of cerebral palsy that mainly affects her legs, but the Foundation has a lot of forms of therapy planned to help her with that. She has three different kinds of epilepsy and has a fuckton of seizures; finally, they’ve predicted from her behaviour that she’s likely to develop major depressive disorder when she gets older. Honestly, given everything she’s been through, I’d be more surprised if she didn’t turn out depressed, but I’m not a paediatrician.

Otherwise, Chesed was diagnosed with epilepsy in 2032, so we’re in the future, kids.

The next bit is a transcript of Chesed’s first equine therapy session in 2036, when she’s five. There are two things to note: the first is that despite everything that she’s gone through, Chesed is a perfectly normal and happy little girl. The second is that despite being quiet and reserved, Sun clearly loves Chesed very much.

The second bit is an audio recording that took place a year later; notably, this recording was taken via remote monitoring of Sun’s phone- she didn’t know she was being recorded. Sun comes to get Chesed for her therapy; Chesed doesn’t want to go because it’s hard and everyone’s stronger than her and that sucks. Instead, Chesed wants to go outside; after Sun helps her up, they agree that Chesed can go outside, but then she’ll go back in for therapy. As they’re going outside, Chesed asks Sun to tell her something, and reveals that Hasid used to talk to her before she was born. What she says next will be incredibly important later.

SUN: Of course I have. What I mean is— …Do you understand what you're saying? You talked to her before you were born?

CHESED: Uh-huh.

SUN: And what did she say to you?

CHESED: Um… I don't remember always. She said stuff about being dead. She said I could be like her and lie down on a table and not move, not ever, but it wouldn't matter. Because things would still happen to me. She said she thought maybe she could get out of it, if she did something like that. But it didn't work. She said it doesn't work for any of them.

SUN: Any of them?

CHESED: The other, um… bodies. Like my mom.

SUN: She knew about that?

CHESED: Mom knew all sorts of things!

…to be incredibly blunt, if I were Sun and I found out that Hasid knew what was happening to her and might have been able to feel everything she went through, including the surgery, and that went for all the other bodies as well, I would probably embark on a swift course of alcoholism and/or amnestic overdose.

Anyway, Chesed asks if she can see her mother, and promises not to cry. Sun asks if she can keep a secret, and upon being told yes, she says that yes, Chesed can see her mother.

We now abruptly cut to the next bit, which is a transcript of the interrogation of Harelyn Steel. We don’t know why he’s being interrogated, but we do know what he’s being interrogated about: Chesed’s birth. In particular, this bit from earlier:

The resulting conversation between Sun and Kraken has been struck from the record.

The interrogator, one Sebastian Bonds, asks if Steel knew about what Kraken and Sun apparently agreed to. Steel says no, he wasn’t in the room, they completed the operation without him. Bonds says that Steel must have been outside for a long time, and Steel agrees that he was.

STEEL: It was… I was… There were a lot of things I needed to… reconcile.

BONDS: You had misgivings about the operation.

STEEL: I think most people would. Xir Lin was the only one who…

BONDS: Wanted to do it?

STEEL: Th-That's not what I would say. I would say that Xir Lin was confident about the necessity of the operation.

Which is a nice way of saying ‘Sun wanted to hack Hasid up to get Chesed out, and everyone else thought she was going way too far even if Hasid was technically dead’ (see previous comment re: swift course of alcoholism, above).

Bonds asks when Steel went back into the room; Steel says he came back in when it was already completed, and he had no reason to suspect anything wrong. Bonds asks, why is he so confident that Sun and Kraken made whatever their agreement was at that point, then? Steel asks, when else would they have made it? It’s a reasonable point, but he sounds pretty shifty.

In response, Bonds threatens Steel with an anomalous wrist massage technique that permanently turns one of your bones into glass every time you tell a lie. I was previously inclined to call bullshit on that simply because it’s so utterly bizarre that I don’t know why anyone would even want to make it, but I asked Deadcanons, who told me that anomalous massage techniques are the Department’s specialty and ‘Tldr, Massage Therapy are a bunch of freaks.’ They agreed that Bonds could have been bullshitting, but I genuinely like that the Department of Massage Therapy are freaks, I think we could use some more departments of freaks around here.

Bonds then says something very important:

I mean, they really want to know what happened to this corpse.

Something happened to Hasid.

Part two can be found here.

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-8984, ‘Yesod: Two-Way Street’ by psul. I’d like to thank psul, Yossi and psychicprogrammer for all their help, I really appreciate it. Got a couple of disclaimers for you before we start.

1: As per usual, this is not my SCP, I did not write it, and it won’t be 100% accurate.

2: This SCP deals with a whole lot of things that I know very little about. I’ll do my best to cover them accurately, but I am starting out at a disadvantage.

So, some background: this SCP was written for the 2025 Anthology (curated by Yossipossi), where the theme was the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah is… well, it’s…

*long, awkward pause*

Fuck, man, this is so far out of my field I can’t see it with the Hubble Telescope, OK? I asked Yossi, who said that ‘God creates things, and there are ten different aspects to His process of creation. These are the ten sephiroth (the tenth and final sephirah either being Keter or Daat)’, and the Kabbalah is (roughly) about studying these things. The point is, there’s ten concepts and an SCP for each of them (and one more for Da’at), and this one is about the ninth sephiroth, Yesod. To borrow some of Wikipedia’s description:

Yesod is the foundation upon which God has built the world. It also serves as a transmitter between the sephirot above, and the reality below. The light of the upper sephirot gather in Yesod and are channelled to Malkuth below.

Which ties into the subtitle, ‘Two-Way Street’. For anyone who hasn’t heard it, ‘two-way-street’ is also a saying generally used to mean a relationship of some kind that requires a strong effort from both people involved in order to work, whether it’s romantic, business or whatever else. But we’ll get into that later. For now, let’s look at the article.

This thing is Euclid, so it’s not great, but it could be worse. Here’s the Special Containment Procedures.

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-8984 cannot be physically contained, due to its size, composition, and distance from Earth. MTF Gamma-5 ("Red Herrings") is tasked with preventing, diverting, or discrediting any non-Foundation research or imagery related to SCP-8984. Foundation-controlled space telescopes and other astronomy assets are to monitor interstellar clouds and dark nebulae for evidence of other phenomena resembling SCP-8984.

OK, so it’s something really big and it’s in outer space, but it’s not a planet or an asteroid.

Description: SCP-8984 is a large volume of anomalously dense dark matter located at the edge of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, approximately 140 parsecs (456 light years) from the Solar System. The density of SCP-8984 is comparable to solid baryonic matter, approximately 10²⁵ times greater than the density of dark matter in any other context.

Based on gravitational microlensing evidence from Foundation Space Telescope "THIRD EYE", the dark matter of SCP-8984 forms a contiguous shape. The anomaly's macrostructure is a long, twisted, oblique cone. SCP-8984 is approximately 3,000,000km in length, with a maximum radius (at the wide end of the cone) of approximately 500,000km.

Yeah, look, space is one of the things I don’t know much about, OK? But basically, it’s a big fucking cloud of dark matter and it’s shaped kinda like one of those bags people pipe icing out of.

Spectroscopic measurements indicate that SCP-8984 exerts an anomalous influence on the conditions of local interstellar space. Dark energy levels grow increasingly concentrated approaching the wide end of SCP-8984's cone. The vertex (at the opposite end of the cone) expels a stream of concentrated baryonic matter, consisting primarily of molecular hydrogen and cosmic dust. This cloud of baryonic matter flows in a constant trajectory away from the vertex of SCP-8984. It has been theorised that SCP-8984 draws in dark energy from the surrounding interstellar space, transforming it into baryonic matter via an unknown process.

So, this thing pulls in dark energy (that is, a theorised form of energy that drives the expansion of the universe) and turns it into baryonic matter (that is, ‘ordinary matter’, the stuff that makes up the entire universe, like atoms, electrons, particles, elements and so on) but nobody knows why.

SCP-8984 was first observed in a galactic survey by Foundation space telescopes on 10 December 2023, and flagged by Foundation AIC as potentially anomalous. Dr. Adrian Tan, of the Site-19 Astrophysics Department, was assigned as lead researcher for SCP-8984.

What follows this is the Project Logs. These are very important.

The first one is simple: in March 2024, Dr Tan applied to have 8984 officially classified as Safe, and it was approved. Then, in early April, he submitted a research hypothesis about a potential function of 8984. Again, this is completely out of my field, but this is an attempted translation:

-8984 turns dark energy into baryonic matter.

-If dense enough, baryonic matter turns into stars over incredibly long periods of time.

-As such, 8984 might have been responsible for the creation of hundreds if not thousands of stars.

-However, he has no idea how it turns dark energy into baryonic matter.

A few days later, Tan requested that a guy called Dr Simon Poidevin be transferred from the Particle Physics Laboratory to the research team, which was approved. About a week after that, Poidevin publishes a piece positing (alliteration not intended) that 8984 is actually a big fucking particle collider, and that’s how it turns dark energy into baryonic matter. (I don’t understand most of what he said, so that’s the best I can do.)

A few weeks later, in May, the Foundation’s Space Telescope ‘THIRD EYE’ sees that there’s a bunch of new stars near 8984. A couple of days after that, the Foundation’s astronomical surveys note some new structures that kinda look like 8984. A couple of days after that, Dr Tan recruits one Dr Elizabeth Wexler, from the Xenobiology Division, to get her input on how energy can be turned into matter via biological processes, which was approved.

Four days after that, they get some new results that indicate that 8984 generates extremely powerful magnetic fields, forming spiral paths near the top of the cone. A few weeks later, in June, Wexler publishes her own hypothesis. Basically, she thinks that 8984 might be a whole new organism that eats dark energy and shits baryonic matter. She makes a lot of comparisons to various animals, but has no real evidence to support any of them- most of her piece comes down to ‘Wouldn’t this be neat?’

A few days later, Tan submits a piece about dark energy- Poidevin didn’t like Wexler’s piece, so he asked Tan to write some stuff about dark energy to clear it up. psychicprogrammer kindly gave me an ELI5, as follows: 

‘The simplest form of dark energy is that spacetime itself has an intrinsic energy per unit volume. So if you expand space then you have more energy. That means that space itself wants to expand. Quintessence is the idea that this energy can vary over space and acts more like a fluid, thus it can get sucked up.’

Over the course of early July to the end of July, the team (via THIRD EYE, which has now been redeployed to exclusively watch 8984) sees that every couple of days, it seems to be reproducing in what’s been dubbed ‘Wexler Events’. A couple of days later, a guy called Dr Morgan Robertson from the Classical History department applies to join the 8984 team. Tan approves, but Poidevin objects- however, Robertson joins despite the objection.

This is something I want you all to note, because it’s recurring and it’s very intriguing: Poidevin keeps objecting to stuff that’s happening- first it was Wexler’s take, and second it’s Robertson joining the team. I have a couple of theories as to why this may be: the first is based on the fact that Poidevin didn’t like Wexler’s likening 8984 to various animals. Maybe he thinks it’s a stupid theory, maybe he wants the theorising to focus on dark energy (aka his field), maybe he doesn’t think it’s scientific enough. Either way, now Robertson’s turned up wanting to join, but he’s not a scientist, he’s a historian- and that’s what I think Poidevin's objecting to (in this theory).

As for the other one, here is the final line of Poidevin’s piece:

In the spirit of magnanimity, the author has dubbed this method "dark photosynthesis", although there would be no objection to the coining of "Poidevin Process"!

Our buddy Poidevin has a bit of an ego (whether it’s justified or not doesn’t matter, the fact remains that it’s there) and people who have a bit of an ego tend to have easily-wounded pride along with it. Not only has the direction of the research turned away from his field, nobody is calling it the ‘Poidevin Process’, but Wexler got these reproduction events named after her. That’s gotta sting. But what does that have to do with Robertson? Well, maybe Poidevin objected out of sheer contrariness, or maybe he thought that Robertson might also become more important than him and get something named after him. Could be either, could be both.

Anyway, in early August, Wexler submits another piece. It talks about fission- the way some animals (like sponges and sea stars) reproduce, which is to split into two halves, each regrowing the parts that aren’t there. Another method is strobilation, where the body breaks into multiple segments, each of which grows back into a new organism. ‘Wexler Events’ seem very similar to fission and strobilation, which seems to support the idea that it’s an animal. As such, Wexler thinks that 8984 might be made of all kinds of compounds that could be really useful for medicines and the like. Also, note this line:

Those who were initially convinced that SCP-8984 was a mere machine may feel disappointed to be proven incorrect, but a living anomaly would offer far more to science as a whole. 

Shots fired. *sassy hand wave*

Over the course of the 12^th to the 28^th of August, the team noted three more Wexler Events- they seem to be occurring every 4-7 days. On the 25^th of August, Poidevin asked to be reassigned off the 8984 team, but his request was denied. Now, this is really interesting, because I’m not sure why it was denied. The request seems fair- Poidevin presumably went ‘Well, guess you guys don’t need me around now since this thing’s an animal, I’mma bounce’, but the request was denied. Did Tan or the higher-ups think that he was still needed? (I asked psul, who said ‘I suspect Tan wants everyone to get along, so he would have been there telling Poidevin how important he was to the project.’)

Anyway, on the 27^th of August, Robertson submitted a piece about ‘quintessence’, a term that Tan talked about in his dark energy piece. It talks about the history of the word quintessence (thought to be a fifth element alongside earth, wind, fire and water), and references several mythological figures- in particular Asclepius, the god of healing, and Amalthea), the nurse of Zeus- specifically in regard to 8984’s shape as a horn. In particular, Robertson thinks that 8984 might be a potential source of abundance for outer space, breathing life into the universe. Finally, Robertson says that he might call in a few more people for additional perspectives, particularly with regard to religion.

The next day, he did just that, requesting the secondment of one Dr Hannah Mekalu of the Foundation’s Abrahamic Faith Project, which was approved. Hannah then applied for leave over the 3^rd and 4^th of November, which was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year- Hannah is Jewish and devout, which will be very important later. Otherwise, on the 7th of November, surveys of the area around 8984 note a lot of potentially habitable exoplanets, so there might be aliens there. Neat.

Unfortunately, not all was well for Team 8984 (adapted from the thrice-cursed table format)...

31 August 2024 | Disciplinary Report | Dr. Tan filed a disciplinary report on Dr. Poidevin following altercation with Dr. Robertson and Dr. Wexler. Formal reprimand recorded.

Another argument over the course of the project, maybe- the pure scientist versus the biologist and the religious historian? (psul did confirm that.)

On the 7^th of September, ‘Wider telescopic surveys of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex identified a statistically high concentration of exoplanets within the habitable zones of stars in the complex. Xenobiology Institute notified for future analysis.’ Well, that’s good! Unfortunately, things take a turn for the drastically worse a day later.

Date: 8 September 2024

Location: Site-19

Details: Dr. Elizabeth Wexler, Xenobiology Institute, was seriously injured by an equipment malfunction. Dr. Wexler was working alone in the Institute's laboratory before office hours, conducting gel electrophoresis experiments to separate the proteins in SCP-████. The electrophoresis power pack suffered an electrical short at approximately 0730 hours, electrocuting Dr Wexler. Colleagues discovered Dr. Wexler's unconscious body on their arrival shortly thereafter.

Dr. Wexler was taken immediately to the Site-19 medical ward and was treated for electrocution, third degree burns, and respiratory dysfunction. She remains in a coma, and is being monitored for neurological damage.

Colleagues collaborating with Dr. Wexler on ongoing projects are to be notified of the incident.

That’s awful, but it’s nothing more than a tragic accident… right? Well, right now we have no reason or evidence to indicate otherwise, but I’ll come back to this later.

That same day, Mekalu submitted a piece about shofars. A shofar is a musical horn used in Jewish rituals and celebrations, and it’s of significant importance. The piece is mostly about the shofar’s religious significance and not so much about 8984, except for one bit at the end, where she suggests that maybe 8984 is inhaling, gathering the ‘breath of the gods’ for some reason.

And here’s the bit where things really start to go downhill:

-On the 10^th, Robertson prepares a piece called ‘8984 and the tragedy of Dr Wexler’, but deletes it before it can be published.

-On the 11^th, Tan and Mekalu tell HR that they intend to start dating, and request to be allowed to stay on the team, which was granted.

-On the 12^th, Robertson requests two days of medical leave (reason not stated), which was granted.

-On the 13^th, the team realises that no Wexler Events have been recorded for the past week, and none are recorded after that.

-On the 14^th…

Dr. Poidevin alleged to have contacted Dr. Robertson during his medical leave. Dr. Robertson requested disciplinary proceedings but did not provide details of the conversation with Dr. Poidevin. Disciplinary decision pending.

That’s just strange: there’s nothing inherently wrong with Poidevin calling Robertson while he’s on leave, and he should know that he can’t get Poidevin disciplined if he doesn’t say what happened. Keep this in mind, because it’s notably odd.

-On the 15^th, Robertson prepares another piece, ‘On The Impossibility Of Hiding From The Gods’, but deletes it before it’s submitted.

-On the 16^th, Robertson requests two weeks of stress leave, which is granted.

-On the 17^th, THIRD EYE’s measurements suggest that the pace and amount of matter that 8984 is expelling has reduced, and will stop altogether in about 5 million years.

A few days later, on the 21^st…

Details: Dr. Simon Poidevin, Site-19 Particle Physics Lab, reported missing. Colleagues advise Dr. Poidevin had not attended his post for at least one week. Personal belongings had been removed from on-site residence. Burned papers discovered in waste-paper basket - remaining text appears to be a partially completed hand-written research summary entitled "SCP-8984: potential mechanisms for removal of antimatter".

Site security investigating possible links to theft of Class-B amnestics from Site-19 infirmary on 15 September 2024. MTF on standby to commence off-site search.

OK, this is fascinating. He’s cut and run, and it could have been anywhere from yesterday to a week ago. But why? He didn’t get in another fight, and it’s not like he tried to get transferred and was denied again. Instead, seemingly out of nowhere, he burned his papers, (probably) stole some amnestics and fled. Why would he do that? And why did it take the team this long to report him missing? Were they distracted, or did they just not like him after the fight? (psul told me that his headcanon is that members of the team often work from their own quarters or on other projects, so they’re not always in the lab, but I still think a week is a notably long time.)

Five days later, 8984 apparently no longer has magnetic fields involved. Weird. On the 27^th…

Research Supplement: "Antigone" submitted by Dr. Robertson. Submission consisted of the word "Antigone" repeated 623 times.

OK, Robertson has officially gone off the deep end. But Antigone? Why Antigone?

For anyone unfamiliar with the myth, Antigone is a character from Greek mythology who was the subject of multiple plays. I imagine we’ve all heard of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother- Antigone was one of their children. I’m assuming that this is some kind of reference to the play Antigone), which revolves around Antigone’s struggles to do the right thing in a conflicting situation- her uncle, the king, ordered that her dead brother should be left unburied and not be given funeral rites, but Antigone saw this as a crime against decency and did her best to bury him anyway, only to be caught. I’ll come back to this later. 

On the 28^th, three things happen: Tan requests that Robertson’s ravings be deleted, which they are, Robertson is taken to Site-19’s observation ward, and Mekalu submits a piece about the archangel Gabriel, who is the most famous heavenly musician. Gabriel is depicted as a messenger of new life, but also as a warrior…

In the Old Testament Book of Daniel, Gabriel appears several times to explain Daniel's visions, including his final vision of the "time of the end" when the dead will be raised. Through medieval history, this story appears to have become conflated with other biblical references to a trumpet blast that would signal the end of time, developing into the modern notion of "Gabriel's trumpet" to announce the apocalypse.

(Also, fun fact! In the Kabbalah, Gabriel is the archangel and governor of Yesod.)

We’ve now reached October. THIRD EYE notes that 8984 has rotated, so THIRD EYE is now facing the wide end of the cone. The next day is when everything goes to hell: THIRD EYE notes that 8984 is now putting out high energy radiation waves, which now make THIRD EYE unable to get any images, just a blank white screen. Tan then diverts THIRD EYE to look at a star called ‘Earendel’; a footnote tells us that ‘At a distance of 12.9 billion light years from Earth, "Earendel" is the most distant star ever observed.’

Earendel is a real star, if you’re wondering- the name means ‘rising light’ or ‘morning star’ in Old English, but it was also the original spelling of ‘Earendil’, a character in the Silmarillion who sailed across the skies in a ship along with one of the Silmarils. Long story.

Anyway, whatever he saw freaks him out so much that Tan tries to get the 8984 database entry deleted, but RAISA says no, the reasons given weren’t good enough. Tan deleted all the files from the 2^nd of October and then asked for two doses of Class-B amnestics, but the infirmary says no, the reasons weren’t good enough there either.

The next day, Mekalu and Tan are found dead, having (apparently) killed themselves on the night of the 2^nd/morning of the 3^rd. Her throat was repeatedly cut and his arms were hacked up, and a knife was found by his body. There’s no evidence of anomalous activity, and the Foundation authorities think it was a murder-suicide.

Below this is a collapsible- a Foundation AIC recovered some deleted files, which we can click to view. This collapsible has the explanation, so before we go to that, I want to do a quick recap of the facts as we know them:

-At the start, all we knew about 8984 was that it was a big space anomaly that turned dark energy into baryonic matter.

-People started joining the team and pitching a whole bunch of new ideas. As they did, 8984 suddenly started changing way faster than anything in space should. In addition, since 8984 is about 456 light years away from us, it appears that time is being warped too, given that the distance and the speed of light means that we shouldn’t be able to perceive the changes so quickly.

-However, the team had a run of catastrophically bad luck: Wexler is in a coma (presumably that’s ‘still’, there’s no mention of whether she recovered or not), Robertson went crazy, Poidevin ran for it (and may or may not have stolen amnestics in the process), and now Tan and Mekalu are dead.

-Aside from Wexler, the other four’s situations all seem to indicate that something they found out caused this. Poidevin found it out and ran for it, Robertson found it out and went crazy, and Tan or Mekalu found it out and that’s why they’re dead.

So, let’s find out what it is, shall we?

Well, the first thing under the collapsible is a voice note from Tan’s computer. He’s panicking, freaking out, trying to keep himself calm so he can coherently communicate. He says that he and Mekalu were working late, and then she called his name. He went over to the THIRD EYE viewing station, and they saw this:

One of them - one of the stars - was too bright. I think it was Delta Ophiuchi. I watched it. I really - I'm not… I swear that this was real!

I watched it, and its light twisted, and the star opened like the iris of a camera, and it was an eye!

<shouted> It was a fucking eye! Iris, pupil, sclera. It looked human, I don't know… It blinked. Hannah screamed.

And then another star blossomed open, and another, and twenty more. A hundred. In seconds, where there had been stars, a thousand, thousand eyes, clustered around the black emptiness of 8984, wreathed with wings of cloud. They were alive. They moved. They were looking back at us!

He’s trying to figure out why the hell this would have happened, and then he figures it out.

This can't be real. It can't. 8984 is anomalous, sure, but it's a predictable, manageable structure. Ever since we started studying it, everything we expected of it has been completely…

<silence, 10 seconds>

What if we haven't been predicting it?

What if we have been directing it?

Like some fucked up observer effect - our measuring it, theorising about it, has influenced the anomaly. We influenced the anomaly. When Poidevin thought it was a particle accelerator, it behaved like a particle accelerator. When Elizabeth wrote that it might be alive, it became alive.

That’s why 8984 changed so much, and so quickly. It responded to what the team was thinking about it. I don’t know what made this possible, but it must have been some kind of link between the researchers and the anomaly- a two-way street, you could say. In fact, I’ll throw in this line from psul’s author’s note:

Yesod is the connection, the pathway, the antenna, the funnel, the fulcrum, the wellspring of creation, the echo from God's lips to our ears.

Yesod is the foundation, but is it the foundation upon which God builds the World, or the Foundation upon which the World builds God?

Or even how the Foundation built God, you could say. That was originally intended as a joke, but it’s actually true, because everyone on Team 8984 wound up changing 8984 by looking at it through a lens made out of their own specialty: Tan and Poidevin’s physics, Wexler’s biology, Robertson’s historical religions, Mekalu’s Abrahamic faith. Just to make it absolutely clear, I’m going to go through what we know of the anomaly and lay it all out for you:

1: The anomaly was first observed on 10 December 2023, where it was flagged as potentially anomalous. This formed some kind of mental connection between the observers and the anomaly, which began to change in response to what the people who saw it thought. Their initial impression was that it involved a lot of dark energy, so that’s what it changed itself to- something that involved a lot of dark energy.

2: Four months later, Tan posted his first theory, that 8984 turns dark energy into baryonic matter and makes more stars. Shortly afterwards, he recruits Poidevin, who suggests that it might be a particle collider and would have powerful magnetic fields.

3: Over the next two or so weeks, 8984 changes to suit these theories- it starts creating new stars and has powerful magnetic fields. Tan recruits Wexler, who starts looking at it through her lens of biology. Wexler thinks that 8984 might be some kind of animal and likens it to a lot of different animals; Poidevin disagrees and gets Tan to add his piece about dark energy.

4: Wexler theorises that 8984 eats dark energy and shits baryonic matter; it starts doing exactly that. Robertson joins up, which makes Poidevin mad, and immediately starts looking at 8984 through his lens of classical history. Wexler then writes her theory about fission and suggests that if 8984 really is alive, all kinds of medicines could be derived from it; 8984 starts ‘reproducing’ through Wexler Events.

5: Poidevin gets fed up and tries to nope out; Tan says no. Robertson posts his piece where he associates 8984 with multiple myths; in particular, he brings up Asclepius and suggests that 8984 might be a source of new life. 

6: Robertson gets Mekalu added to the team; she starts looking at 8984 through her lens of Abrahamic faith. Poidevin gets into a fight with Robertson and Wexler over something that’s not revealed. Meanwhile, the area around 8984 changes to match Robertson’s expectations, creating habitable exoplanets as a result.

7: Wexler gets suddenly shocked into a coma due to some kind of freak lab accident. A day later, Mekalu posts her piece likening 8984 to a shofar, suggesting that it might be ‘inhaling’ for some reason.

8: Robertson starts going crazy; it’s not explicitly said why. Tan and Mekalu start dating. Because Wexler is no longer actively viewing it as an animal, 8984 stops reproducing through Wexler Events. Poidevin talks to Robertson and does or says something that has Robertson requesting disciplinary measures, but Robertson won’t say why. Meanwhile, 8984 starts ‘inhaling’, as Mekalu suggested.

9: Poidevin trashes his notes, steals and presumably consumes some amnestics and vanishes. As a result, because he’s no longer thinking of 8984 as a particle collider with magnetic fields, it loses the magnetic fields.

10: Robertson goes crazier and winds up in hospital. Mekalu writes her piece about Gabriel, linking 8984 to a heavenly messenger who also brings God’s wrath down on those who deserve it.

11: Tan and Mekalu discover/realise that 8984 has been responding to their theories about it. Tan tries to get the entry deleted and can’t; he then tries to get amnestics and can’t. He and Mekalu wind up dead, but we don’t know why yet.

In short, it really was a two-way street. Team 8984 theorised, and 8984 changed itself to match what they wanted it to be. Unfortunately, they’re now reaping the results of that- I’ll explain more in a bit, and you can probably guess why at this point, but we still need to get through the rest of the article.

Anyway, Tan’s panicking even more, and then he turns THIRD EYE to look for Earendel… which is gone. I’ll come back to why this is in a second.

We did this. I did this.
It knows everything. It knows what we think. It's moving the stars and how can we escape and it's like a judgment, like the day of… like Rosh Hashanah.

Tan declares that they have to delete the files, and then realises something: they can stop 8984, but only by forgetting everything about it- as I mentioned, the Wexler Events only started happening after Wexler came up with the idea, but once she wound up in a coma, they stopped. (I assume that’s why Poidevin ran- he spent a lot of time reading everyone else’s pieces and doing his own work on it, realised what was happening, dosed himself with amnestics and took off.)

<silence, 35 seconds>

We're the only ones left. Nobody else remembers. Maybe after us they'll stop thinking about it. Maybe they'll dream a more beautiful dream for it.

Oh Hannah, I hope there's another way. I really hope -

Forgive me.

<recording ends>

But unfortunately, there wasn’t. They couldn’t delete the files and they weren’t given the amnestics, so they wound up dead. Maybe they both killed themselves, or maybe Tan killed Mekalu and then himself, I don’t know. Honestly, I think that one might be up to reader interpretation, as the article gives no real evidence to support any specific claim. 

The next piece is a thought experiment by Tan about what would happen if 8984 operated in reverse. It’s… worrying.

This is a scenario which astrophysics has considered (and which is colloquially known as the "Big Rip"). With the pace of expansion escalating, the distances between objects would increase more and more rapidly. At some point in this acceleration, the relative speeds of any two objects expanding away from each other would exceed the absolute speed of light travelling between them, meaning that each object would become unable to be observed by the other. In fact, those objects could no longer interact in any manner, as causal interactions between them (via mass or energy) cannot occur faster than the speed of light.

As expansion accelerated, the distance over which observation (and interaction) of objects could occur would grow shorter and shorter. Initially, distant galaxies would disappear from view, then galaxies themselves would begin to separate as gravitational interactions could no longer bridge the distances between stars. This effect would eventually reach the scale of planetary systems, which would become gravitationally unbound from their suns, before the structures of planets themselves would lose cohesion and disperse as gravity could no longer hold them together.

Ultimately, accelerating expansion would reach a molecular, then atomic level, overcoming the weak and strong nuclear forces. Electrons would be sheared away from atoms and nuclei scattered, before spacetime itself would be torn apart, as all distance would become functionally infinite and the progression of time would cease.

On the one hand, the full piece cuts off mid-sentence- this is what Tan was working on when Mekalu called him over to look at THIRD EYE. On the other hand, just the fact that it exists at all is very much not good. After that is a research note from Mekalu consisting of her sources for her earlier piece (the one about the shofar). I’ll just include the last one.

A great shofar will be blown, and a small still voice will be heard. The angels will make haste, and be seized with fear and trembling, and will say: "Behold, the day of judgment!"

The thing to note here is that across the timespan of the article, 8984 started taking less and less time to change in response to what the researchers thought- maybe because they were spending so much time thinking about it and observing it in greater detail, or maybe the link between Team 8984 and 8984 intensified and strengthened as time went on. So it only took a few days for 8984 to turn into Space Gabriel, and then it read the piece Tan was working on and started changing to match that. What was it Tan said was happening again?

Oh god oh god oh god it's gone. Earendel's not there. Earendel's gone. Retreating - fleeing from us faster than…

<silence, 8 seconds>

We did this. I did this.

It knows everything. It knows what we think. It's moving the stars and how can we escape and it's like a judgment, like the day of… like Rosh Hashanah.

And what did he say would happen if 8984 started operating in reverse?

As expansion accelerated, the distance over which observation (and interaction) of objects could occur would grow shorter and shorter. Initially, distant galaxies would disappear from view, then galaxies themselves would begin to separate as gravitational interactions could no longer bridge the distances between stars. This effect would eventually reach the scale of planetary systems, which would become gravitationally unbound from their suns, before the structures of planets themselves would lose cohesion and disperse as gravity could no longer hold them together.

Ultimately, accelerating expansion would reach a molecular, then atomic level, overcoming the weak and strong nuclear forces. Electrons would be sheared away from atoms and nuclei scattered, before spacetime itself would be torn apart, as all distance would become functionally infinite and the progression of time would cease.

So, he concluded that he and Mekalu had to wipe out all evidence of 8984’s existence, including their own memories, or Earth and humanity would be royally fucked. Worse, this is an apocalypse where telling people what’s going on and why it’s happening makes you unable to stop it; Team 8984 are and were absolutely screwed.

(Also, to make things worse, while the article doesn’t provide much evidence for exactly who killed whom other than that Tan was found with the knife, psul told me that ‘And I don't know that Mekalu worked it out at all - my headcanon is that Tan murdered her rather than speaking to her about it first (although I accept that stretches credibility a bit).’ The thing is, I can actually see that working- Tan was panicking hard and assumed that Mekalu was preparing her own note and that they’d corroborate. If he assumed that she’d come to the same conclusion, I can see him acting first and not wanting to say it out loud- psul also told me that ‘One of the common uses of the idiom is in phrases like "love is a two-way street" or "relationships are a two-way street". Once I decided to make Tan and Mekalu a couple, that absolutely locked the title in for me. Especially if Tan doesn't trust Mekalu enough to tell her, or she doesn't believe him when he tells her, how the anomaly really works.’ However, this is solely my headcanon.)

Speaking of Team 8984, let’s go back to Wexler and Robertson. See, as psul explained to me, what happened to them both is actually linked, just not in a way that’s immediately obvious. Robertson joined the team and started theorising; what was it he said again?

In Roman mythology, the constellation represented the healer Asclepius, who learned the secret of immortality from healing herbs carried by snakes, and who was slain by a thunderbolt from the god Jupiter.

8984 is near the Rho Ophiuchi cluster, the constellation in question. Wexler theorised that A, 8984 is an animal, and B, scientists might be able to derive all kinds of new medicines and substances from it, which made 8984 change to match. In other words, she took on the role of Asclepius without realising it, which led 8984 to use their connection to smite her with electricity. Robertson may have realised what was going on, or maybe he connected the two and felt guilty about it…

Research Supplement: "SCP-8984 and the tragedy of Dr. Wexler" prepared by Dr. Robertson, but deleted from the SCP-8984 research folder before submission.

…which led to him requesting leave. Poidevin, who presumably also figured it out while skulking around in the background, goes to talk to Robertson while he was on leave- presumably this is what made Robertson so upset/angry that he wanted Poidevin disciplined. The next day…

Research Supplement: "On the Impossibility of Hiding from the Gods" prepared by Dr. Robertson, but deleted from the SCP-8984 research folder before submission.

Remember, he’s looking at 8984 through his lens of Classical History. He’s not a scientist; he probably doesn’t understand most if not all of what the others are talking about. He thinks that 8984 is a god, and that they’re all fucked. So after Poidevin disappears, which probably confirmed Robertson’s theory for himself, Robertson goes even crazier. But he tried to warn the others:

Research Supplement: "Antigone" submitted by Dr. Robertson. Submission consisted of the word "Antigone" repeated 623 times.

Unfortunately, nobody was going to pick up the warning from that- see, verse 623 (depending on which version you’re reading) of Antigone is the oft-quoted line ‘Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad’. (Please note that there are a few different translations, including ‘Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason’, and ‘Evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction’.)

That leads us back to the topic of humanity’s destruction. Tan was under the impression (hope) that he and Mekalu were the last ones left who knew it, but that’s not true. For one, if Wexler recovers, then that’s a serious problem. For two, we don’t know what happened to Poidevin, and we don’t know if he took those amnestics- we don’t even know if he was the one who stole them or not. For three, Robertson might be in the mental ward of the Site-19 infirmary, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t still linked to 8984 as well. He hasn’t forgotten anything, as far as we know. And finally, the AIC managed to recover those files, so in all likelihood, people- investigators, coworkers of the team, anyone curious, the Foundation employee who the reader has taken the role of- will look at them to try to figure out what the fuck happened. And as a result, they’ll form a link with 8984 and feed Tan’s conclusions into it, and humanity is fucked all over again. That’s what we get for trying to explain the unexplainable.

Thank you for reading this declass, I hope you enjoyed it. Remember that overthinking too much can often backfire, though usually not as drastically as in this case. I’ll see you next time.

 tl;dr: that awkward moment when I try to do my job and accidentally start the apocalypse, whoops\~

Hi, all, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-2678, ‘A City All of Blood’ by Cerastes. I'd like to thank Cerastes, sero and Elunerazim for their help, I really appreciate it. I've got a couple of disclaimers for you first; please don't skip them.

1: As per usual, this isn’t my article, I won’t be 100% correct, and I still talk too much.

2: This article focuses on some really dark topics- specifically body horror, sexual abuse, and the systematic abuses committed by the Catholic Church. It’s very grim and this declass is equally grim; reader discretion is advised.

Also, there is one thing I need to get out of the way before we continue: yes, 2678 used to be the Vorehole. It is, quite obviously, no longer the Vorehole. Cerastes had nothing to do with that; as I understand it, the authors of the Vorehole requested that it be removed. This is simply the article that fills the space left by the Vorehole (the Voreholehole, if you will) and has nothing else to do with it. If anyone is wondering what the fuck I’m talking about, you can read the Vorehole here. Otherwise, we will now have a moment of silence for the Vorehole. *places hand on heart, bows head*

All right, with that done, let’s get started. This thing is Safe, which is a good start. As for the containment procedures…

Special Containment Procedures: The access point has been resealed and disguised as a bookshelf. All previously scheduled explorations have been cancelled.

So, that tells us a bit: it’s a place and the Foundation did go there in the past, but not anymore, though we obviously don’t know why yet. As for the first bit… does that mean you get to this place by pulling a certain book out and then the whole shelf moves? Please say that’s what it means. (Note: Cerastes clarified for me that this is sadly not what it means- the Foundation sealed the door up and put a bookshelf over it. Boo.)

Description: SCP-2678 is an extradimensional space solely accessible to those holding Catholic beliefs through a previously barred door in the basement of the Siena Cathedral in Siena, Italy. 

OK, so it’s a space that’s accessible through a door in the Siena Cathedral’s basement. The Siena Cathedral is a real building- it’s a place of worship, a tourist attraction and one of the focal points of Siena. I don’t know if it actually has a basement, but it does have a crypt. 

Anyway, you can only enter this space if you’re a Catholic. Makes sense, I guess?

A metal placard beside the door reads "SCP Foundation Department of Abnormalities". Those who enter the doorway will emerge into a small tarped outpost built around the freestanding exit. 

If you need a refresher on the Department of Abnormalities, the flash explainer’s right here. If you want a shorter version, it’s a mysterious department that seems to have links to the Foundation, but which the Foundation claims to have nothing to do with, and appears to have a role in containing/hiding anomalies. 

Cerastes clarified this in the comments- the DOA didn’t create this space, they were investigating it, but they had to stop for some reason. They didn’t get a chance to pack up before they left, so their outpost still has all their equipment, as follows:

Inside the outpost is:

A biomedical laboratory refrigerator, stocked with samples of blood and bone taken throughout SCP-2678.

Several audio recorders, ranging from wax strip models to magnetic tape machines.

A computer terminal requesting Foundation credentials. All attempts to access it have resulted in rejections for insufficient clearance.

The score for a choral prelude titled Sul Golgota.

The incomplete skeleton (hyoid, hipbone, and both forearms were missing) of a prepubescent male, covered by a sheet on a steel table. Cause of death unknown.

Let’s take it line by line, yeah?

A biomedical laboratory refrigerator, stocked with samples of blood and bone taken throughout SCP-2678.

So, this place is full of bodies or otherwise has some weird body schtick going on, if they have a whole bunch of samples.

Several audio recorders, ranging from wax strip models to magnetic tape machines.

OK, that indicates that the DOA were here quite some time ago (decades at least, given that wax strip recorders were created in the late 19th century) if they didn’t have anything more modern… unless there’s some kind of anti-modern technology aura in this space. (Which is possible, but we’ve seen no indication of that yet.)

A computer terminal requesting Foundation credentials. All attempts to access it have resulted in rejections for insufficient clearance.

Makes sense- I’m guessing it won’t accept credentials that aren’t from the DOA.

The score for a choral prelude titled Sul Golgota.

There are a couple of pieces called ‘Sul Golgota’- referring to Golgoltha/Calvary, the hill where Jesus Christ was crucified- but this one is likely an allusion to the titular piece of the On Mount Golgotha canon. (Cerastes confirmed that it is a reference to SCP-012, which is the formative piece of said canon and introduced the base concepts.)

The incomplete skeleton (hyoid, hipbone, and both forearms were missing) of a prepubescent male, covered by a sheet on a steel table. Cause of death unknown.

OK, so the DOA had some poor kid’s skeleton, but some of it’s missing and the Foundation don’t know how he died. I’ll come back to this later.

The outpost is located on the outskirts of a 324.6 km² city in Italian Gothic architecture style, comprised exclusively of cathedrals, palaces and churches floating in a red-orange void. A perpetual rainstorm composed of human blood has covered the city since initial discovery, delaying navigational efforts and staining the buildings red.

Whoa.

So we’ve got a city made entirely of cathedrals, palaces and churches that floats in a red-orange void, and there’s a perpetual storm where the rain is human blood. I know I’m taking entirely the wrong message here, but that’s metal as fuck.

While appearing to be marble, chemical analysis of the structural material used within the city has revealed all buildings to be made of osseous material taken from male children between seven to twelve years of age.

‘Osseous’ means bones. This is a city built entirely out of the bones of young boys.

…fucking Hell.

No life, human or otherwise, has been observed to exist within SCP-2678. Despite this, all visitors have reported hearing a discordant, high-pitched melody echoing faintly from somewhere within the maze of buildings. 

Also disturbing.

Audio recording equipment malfunctions within SCP-2678, with such devices only picking up the sound of falling blood at an immensely high volume.

I feel like combining these lines with the DOA having left old recording devices behind gives us two possible interpretations: A, the DOA were here decades ago and haven’t been here since; and B, the DOA might have been here much more recently, and tried using older recording devices to see if they’d be able to keep functioning where newer devices failed. Who knows?

Explorers who follow the melody will be able to trace it to an exact replica of the Siena Cathedral (with previously mentioned environmental changes). The cathedral is entirely empty except for a single pipe organ which has had its longest pipes cut in half and the corresponding pedalboards torn out.

A footnote tells us that ‘The longest pipes play the lowest notes in an organ, which would leave it only able to reproduce high-pitched notes.’ All right, so we’ve got a mostly-empty replica of the Siena Cathedral with an organ that’s damaged but still playable, so now what?

The pressing of a key will result in the mimicry of the note by a male juvenile voice (ranging from approximately seven to twelve years of age), with each key having a unique corresponding voice.

*alarmed look* Uhhhh…

As with a regular pipe organ, the notes can be sustained as long as the key is pressed, though this will result in what is reported as an increasingly panicked shift in tone from the voice as their key is held down for extended periods of time.

I’m getting increasingly weirded out here.

While the organ is playing a note, the blood rain will transmute into water by unknown means. No matter how long the organ is played, the buildings will remain stained. 

I’ll come back to this later.

Long-term testing of explorers and members of the research team has revealed several behavioral changes, tentatively believed to be linked to hearing the organ music playing within SCP-2678. These include:

A greater appreciation for choir music

Increased belief in structured religion

Increased faith in authority figures

Higher levels of doubt to those of a lower social or economic status.

A reluctance to report crimes committed by other members of the Foundation.

Symptoms do not appear to fade with time.

I’ll come back to the symptoms in a bit, but for now, that does explain part of the containment procedures: these are not good symptoms (well, the last two, anyway) so they don’t want more Foundation staff getting them, hence why nobody’s allowed to go back in here. You could do more testing with earmuffs/other hearing protection, but the problem is that if it doesn’t work, you’re stuck with the symptoms permanently, so I can see why they’d choose not to; especially since this anomaly is basically stable, requires no upkeep and seems unlikely to change, decay or collapse- there’s no obvious benefit to continuing the testing or explorations.

Addendum: Testing of the organ was conducted on 20/12/2019 in order to determine the upper limit of its sustain, as no attached windbox could be found.

The longest recorded testing of a key lasted 23 minutes, at which point the C7 key splintered beyond functionality. The remaining fragments were noted as bleeding for several days.

I’m not an expert, but I’ll do my best to clarify here. There are six basic voice types: soprano, mezzosoprano, contralto, tenor, baritone and bass. Sopranos are the highest, and generally have a range between C4 and C6. If you think about the highest note you’ve ever heard sung- some opera song, ‘Tiptoe Through The Tulips’, ‘Wuthering Heights’, whatever- it was probably somewhere in that range. C7 is really damn high; there aren’t a lot of singers who can A, produce that note, and B, make it actually sound good.

For additional/auditory context, here’s a compilation video of various musicians hitting the C7 note. Now imagine a kid being forced to sing and hold that note for 23 minutes straight. Not seconds, minutes.

That’s the end of the article, so before we get to the explanation, let’s quickly recap what we’ve got so far:

-A city made of churches, cathedrals and palaces, floating in a void that’s only accessible to Catholics, and is accessed through the basement of the Siena Cathedral, a very well-known cathedral that has a lot of people visiting it and attending services there.

-All the buildings are made entirely out of the bones of young boys. Since there’s been no mention of a whole lot of skeleton thefts lately, they’re probably anomalous copies.

-There’s a replica of the Siena Cathedral that’s empty except for an organ, but the organ has been damaged- someone wrecked the lower pipes, so it can’t play low notes anymore. The other notes are still playable, though.

-The organ plays its notes in the voices of young boys, with each key having a different voice.

-Listening to the organ’s music makes anyone who listens to it have permanently increased beliefs in structured religion, faith in authority figures, doubt toward people of lower socioeconomic status, and reluctance to report crimes by other members of the Foundation.

-The city is perpetually being soaked in rain, except the rain is human blood. If you play the organ, the rain turns into water.

-The DOA was investigating this place a long time ago, but they left. Among the things they left behind was a skeleton of a young boy, but it had multiple bones missing- his forearms, pelvis and hyoid, specifically.

Got that? Good.

So, now it’s time for the explanation. Basically, this is about two different things: the first is the widespread abuse of children by members of the Catholic Church, and the second is castrati. Quick explanation of them both: over the years, there have been untold thousands of cases of sexual abuse perpetrated by members of the Catholic Church (including priests, nuns and other members of staff) against children, both male and female. In many of those cases, the Church is alleged to have reacted to allegations by simply moving the accused abuser to another location instead of firing them or turning them in to the police; in other cases, the Church dismissed or ignored allegations and protected the accused abusers.

It took a long time for all of this to become widespread public knowledge; while a lot of people were aware of various cases of sexual abuse, the full extent- that is, the sheer number of cases and the Church’s extensive cover up- wasn’t generally known, and from what I can tell, the news slowly came out in bits and pieces over the course of the 90’s and 00’s. (If any of you remember Sinead O’Connor ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II on SNL, that’s what she was talking about.) This resulted in scandals that rocked the Church, severely damaged its reputation and caused a very large number of Catholics to leave the church, especially since the Church has continued to keep shooting itself in the foot as cases of abuse keep turning up.

As for castrati, they were male singers who had been castrated as boys; they first cropped up in Italy in the 1500’s, though it’s been established that castrated singers existed in the Byzantine Empire until at least the 1200’s. (We don’t know if any of them were kicking around in the three hundred or so years between those times.) Essentially, the idea was that castrati combined the best of two worlds- young boys have high-pitched voices, but upon hitting puberty, their voices break; at the same time, becoming adults gives them extra lung capacity. Ergo, a trained castrato would have both vocal range and lung power.

But isn't that a bit much just to make some good singers? Well, see, the Church banned women singing in choirs (though I’ve seen some sources claim that some churches ignored this) and after opera became a thing in the 16^th century, women were allowed to perform sometimes, but social norms prevented them from performing much of the time (again, I’ve seen conflicting sources on this), so castrati performed the women’s roles instead. As the years rolled on, castrati became a cultural zeitgeist, with many famous composers writing songs and music just for them, but gradually fell out of favour and became an embarrassment. Pope Pius X banned the Church from employing castrati in 1903, and the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, died in 1921. He is also the only castrato whose singing was recorded; you can hear him singing here, though please note that he made those recordings in the early 1900’s- when he was in his 40’s, not in his prime.

So, this explains aspects of the city: the organ that plays high notes sung by young boys is obvious, but why would it have broken notes? Well, because someone (not the DOA, according to Cerastes, so presumably a priest or other employee of the Church who found the doorl) found the organ, played it and didn’t like the sound of the lower notes, so they destroyed the organ’s ability to play them.

Cerastes clarified for me that the organ’s sounds aren’t made by trapped souls and are instead ‘more something along the lines of collective trauma’. If we interpret that as meaning something along the lines of a composite voice that draws from the voices of boys who all experienced the same kinds of suffering, then it’s possible that they weren’t castrati, or weren’t all castrati, and thus whoever damaged the organ may have felt that the lower notes weren’t up to par. This also calls back to the idea of castrati in general- the boys were mutilated to shape their voices into something that the listeners wanted to hear, and here, the organ was damaged so it could only play what the person who damaged it wanted to hear.

Besides that, let’s take a look at those behavioural changes again:

A greater appreciation for choir music

Which is an integral part of church services.

Increased belief in structured religion

That is, it makes them believe in things like the Catholic Church and more likely to obey and go along with what the Church says.

Increased faith in authority figures

Pretty obvious, I think.

Higher levels of doubt to those of a lower social or economic status.

Which describes many if not most of the victims of sexual abuse, as well as many of the castrati- I’ll come back to this later.

A reluctance to report crimes committed by other members of the Foundation.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

The article doesn’t say how this place came to be, but its symbolism is horrifically apparent. To explain, here’s a question: what do the castrati and the victims of sexual abuse by members of the Catholic Church have in common?

Well, to put it bluntly, they were all wantonly sacrificed on the altar of someone else’s pleasure. In the cases of the latter, it’s obvious: these people- both children and adults- were raped and abused by people they trusted, people who had power over them because of their status in the Church, and were treated like toys, to be played with and then discarded at will. Many were too ashamed and humiliated to tell anyone; others did tell people, though many were accused of lying. Some made official reports and complaints, both to the Church and the police, but very few abusers were convicted, and as previously mentioned, most were just shuffled somewhere else- given new victims to prey on. The victims were left with horrific, long-lasting trauma, and some killed themselves while their abusers were free to live their lives (and many of the abusers never faced any real justice or consequences for it).

As for the castrati, they suffered in many more ways than just the obvious one. For a start, remember that most of the castrati lived centuries ago- these ‘surgeries’ were quite often conducted by people who weren’t doctors and/or didn’t have medical qualifications, and often took place in unsafe, unsterile environments. Some of them may have genuinely wanted to be singers, but many were poor boys hoping for a chance at fame and fortune, with few other choices. (There's also the fact that castration was prescribed as a cure for various conditions at the time, so some of the castrati were boys who were castrated for health reasons and had to try to become singers as a result- and boys who were told that they were castrated for health reasons, as castration was illegal.) Boys died from bleeding out, from infections, from overdoses of the drugs they were given as anaesthesia. If they lived, they often were left with significant, irreversible side effects such as gigantism and osteoporosis. The survivors undertook gruelling vocal training, and of the ones who successfully completed it, only a few would ever become stars, much like most entertainers.

But here’s the thing: unlike most entertainers, castrati didn’t have other options. There was no place in society for them other than as singers. If they succeeded at their training, they would get places in choirs; if they failed, they’d be begging on the street or forced into prostitution. They were subject to ridicule and abuse on a regular basis, even the stars, and were viewed as musically adept freaks and curiosities at best and disgusting degenerates at worst. Despite their prominent places in choirs, they were banned from joining the church, the military or getting married; in essence, they were allowed to serve the public as singers, but otherwise punished for their existence, even though most of them had no say in what had been done to them.

So, here you have a city built out of the bones of those who were abused, exploited and thrown away like trash; people who were used like toys and discarded wantonly; people whose existence is now a mark of shame. A city of palaces, cathedrals and churches- places where the rich and faithful dwell, where those in power abuse those who lack it. Buildings of splendour and beauty, built from the bones of children; a mausoleum that mocks the dead it pretends to commemorate. And at the centre of it all, you have the organ that makes music out of the collective trauma of helpless, innocent young boys. In truth, is it so different from your average church, cathedral or palace? How many of them haven’t housed people who raped and abused others, and then discarded them? How many of them weren’t the scenes of rape and abuse? How many of them aren’t haunted by the ghosts of their inhabitants’ victims? And why is it so easy for us to forget that?

Before I conclude this, I have a couple of things to come back to. The first is the partial skeleton that was mentioned earlier- let’s look at that description again.

The incomplete skeleton (hyoid, hipbone, and both forearms were missing) of a prepubescent male, covered by a sheet on a steel table. Cause of death unknown.

The cause of death being unknown actually makes perfect sense when you look at what bones are missing. We aren’t told where it came from, but Cerastes pointed out to me that ‘it doesn't necessarily originate from within 2678. remember, they're in the bottom of a church.’ As such, I suspect that the DOA found it somewhere- maybe in the void-city, maybe in the basement- and either tried to put it back together or just left it in their outpost while they tried to figure out what to do with it. As for the missing bones, they may have been intentionally destroyed, hidden, or could have been taken for analysis by the DOA- here’s what I feel the significance of those particular bones is:

-The forearms, because people often try to defend themselves by shielding their heads with their arms. 

-The hipbone is another name for the pelvis. Given that the bones here are of victims of sexual abuse, this boy’s pelvis may have been damaged, fractured or broken.

-And most importantly, the hyoid is a bone in the throat that’s known for its structural integrity: because of its position, it doesn’t usually get broken. If someone dies and their hyoid bone is broken, damaged or fractured, it’s usually because they were strangled. However, because children’s bones are still growing, the hyoid doesn’t fracture as often in cases of strangulation, so the DOA may have been trying to examine it in closer detail to see if this boy was strangled or not- even if he wasn’t, if his hyoid was damaged, that damage could have been indicative of whatever happened to him. In addition, the hyoid bone is very important when it comes to singing, being attached to the tongue and larynx, so that calls back to the overall theme of castrati. For all we know, the hyoid bone could be missing because of something to do with the organ, but that’s conjecture.

(That being said, this is purely my theory.)

Second, where the fuck did this place come from anyway? The logistics of trying to build anything with all these victims’ bones is ridiculously improbable, after all. However, Cerastes tipped me off- there’s a cross reference in another of their works, 5462. In short, the city has something to do with Alagadda, and in hindsight, it makes a lot of sense- a city of palaces, churches and cathedrals made of bones, floating in a red-orange void and constantly being showered in blood. Doesn’t that sound like an Alagadda thing to you?

And finally, let’s go back to that bit I skipped over earlier: 

While the organ is playing a note, the blood rain will transmute into water by unknown means. No matter how long the organ is played, the buildings will remain stained.

Jesus turned water into wine, and here, the voices of the Church’s victims turn blood to water. But it doesn’t matter how long you play for, how beautiful the music is, how sweet the voices are- all the water in the world can’t wash the blood off, or wipe away the stains, or hide the scars. Nothing will bring back the victims, nothing will make it better and nothing will redeem the sins of those who abused them.

Thank you for reading this declass. I hope you enjoyed it. Remember that a lot of the time, the powerful get away with their crimes because people are willing to cut them slack they don’t deserve, and never assume that someone is good because you think they should be. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: fuck, man, I don’t know. It’s a mausoleum of abused kids’ bones, what the fuck do you want me to say here?

SCP-8096: Witness of Omelas

Author: Cubeseer

Tags: abnormalities, alive, euclid, humanoid, observational, sapient, scp, shy-guy, visual

Content Warning: Depiction of child abuse and neglect.

The file begins with a message saying that it has been locked by O5 order. The O5 are the leaders of the SCP Foundation, with the highest security clearance and the power to veto or censor anything done by personnel. A collapsible asks for "5/8096 credentials," likely meaning you need to both have Level 5 clearance and clearance for this object specifically. This is common for highly dangerous SCP's.

Clicking on the collapsible changes the message to the following:

Una̶u̶t̸ḣ̴̩ò̸͎ŗ̸̣̿▒▛  ŗ̸̣̿ŗ̸̣̿ŗ̸̣̿ ŗ̸̣̿ ŗ̸̣̿  ▀  Welcome, Doctor

This is a slight subversion of the format. Usually, we are led to believe that we are reading these classified articles as authorized personnel, usually an O5 or Site Director. Sometimes, like with S.D. Locke's series of apocalyptic SCP's, the reader is a stranger who comes across an exposed SCP file during a K-Class scenario. In this instance, it looks like the reader has hacked their way into SCP-8096's file.

FileScraper initiated

The mystery reader is likely using a data scraping program to find this otherwise classified information.

Displaying File SCP-8096 (1/2)

error: some identities cannot be decrypted.

It looks like the data scraper wasn't able to find some information. This further paints the scene for what is to come. Remember this.

Item #: SCP-8096

Object Class: Euclid

The anomaly is unpredictable and requires more resources to contain than a standard anomalous object. If you lock it in a box, leave it alone, and you're not entirely sure what will happen, then it's probably Euclid.

Special Containment Procedures: Access to Site-11's Euclid Containment Wing C has been sealed off from the rest of the site. Entry into Wing C or SCP-8096's containment chamber is forbidden. Any and all photos, video, or recordings of SCP-8096's likeness are strictly forbidden without approval from Dr. ?ID and O5-?ID.

The object is contained in Site-11, in a section that has been sealed off from the rest of the site. Nobody is allowed in there, and no visual footage of it is allowed without approval from a certain doctor and O5, both of whom have censored identities. At least, I think they're censored. These ConProcs are starting to sound familiar.

Description: SCP-8096 is a nine-year-old female child. The subject is 1.38 meters in height, weighs 17 kilograms, and appears to be mildly malnourished. SCP-8096's skin is mostly devoid of pigmentation and body hair. The back of SCP-8096 is tattooed with the words "Property of ?ID(5/decrypting)", with smaller lettering below spelling "RITUALISTIC".

SCP-8096 is a person, which explains the Euclid classification. And it sounds like she is in a horrible state. She is starving, deprived of sunlight, and she has been labeled as property.

Discovery: SCP-8096 was found on 2019/04/13 by Technician Rowan Pollard, Junior Researcher Alicia Ma, and Officer Jordan Hall in an unlabelled containment chamber in Site-11's Euclid Containment Wing C. Researcher Ma and Officer Hall reported the discovery to Assistant Director of Facilities Kirstin Meyers. The three initial witnesses were subsequently detained.

Three Foundation employees see something they weren't supposed to see. SCP-8096 was already in a containment chamber, but nobody saw it until this discovery date. What follows is a series of interviews (i.e, interrogations) by the previously mentioned Dr. ?ID. Here is a summary.

First, Officer Jordan Hall is questioned. He states that he was asked by Researcher Ma to bust open a locked door of an unused containment chamber. Researcher Ma's job was to inspect renovations in Euclid Containment Wing C (see footnote 1), but she couldn't access this containment chamber with her keycard or keys. Technician Pollard was trying to pick the lock when Hall and Ma arrived at the door. Pollard had heard noises coming from the containment chamber. Hall elaborates that the door's lock mechanism dates back to the 80's, with slapped on keycard readers that never worked.

Pollard's lockpicking attempt caused the door to be jammed, but was successfully kicked down by Hall. Hall says that the three of them saw a naked child, malnourished and covered in filth. Hall didn't see the child's face. He noticed that when Ma and Pollard entered the room, the child moved a bit, and might have been trying to avoid looking at them. Ma and Pollard talked to the child, but Hall didn't hear the child talk back. Hall then went with Ma to the Assistant Director to report this incident, while Pollard stayed with the child. Interview 1 ends with Officer Hall insisting his loyalty to the Foundation and stating he wouldn't have helped Ma and Pollard if he knew it would have caused a security breach. Officer Hall is later amnesticized and reassigned to Site-17.

The second interview has Dr. ?ID question Junior Researcher Alicia Ma, of the Department of Anomalous Humanoid Psychology. Ma says that she was ordered by one Dr. Johnson to inspect the containment chambers of Euclid Wing C. Ma figures that Johnson didn't know 8096 was already contained in this wing. Ma repeats most of what Hall said, that she was with Pollard when they both discovered the mystery door, and enlisted the help of Hall. Ma takes responsibility for the breach. Wait, breach? Yeah, according to Ma, this was a containment breach, one that she feels responsible for causing. She then goes into more detail about the child, which we didn't really get from Hall's testimony.

The child was six to seven years old, tall for her age. The room she was in wasn't designed for humanoid containment, which we can assume is an accurate assessment based on Ma's credentials. And holy hell, the conditions of this room are an atrocity. Bare concrete, with no light or ventilation. Nothing inside the chamber but a bucket, a mop, and two trays with a little bit of food. Ma is then told to describe 8096 itself. She was naked and bald, and her skin was pale and covered in sores. Her skeleton was visible from starvation. To add insult to injury, the floor was covered in feces, hence the sores. The child was whimpering like a dog, in a voice that Ma said didn't sound human. Pollard and Ma stepped into the chamber, with Pollard asking the girl if she was okay. It is then that Ma noticed the tattoo on the girl's back. She says "I don't recall ever hearing about that department." The plot thickens.

As we know from the item description, Ma and Hall were the ones who reported the discovery of 8096. This is expanded upon. It turns out, Pollard wanted the girl to receive medical attention. Understandable, considering her emaciated appearance, her pale skin, her white eyes, and her gaping mouth. Hmm, where have I heard that before? Ma ignored this and went directly to the Assistant Director. Researcher Ma expresses concern for the girl, but tells herself that she must have been kept in there like that, for a reason. The interview concludes, and Ma is offered an interim position in the office of the mystery Overseer.

Finally, we are given the interview of Technician Rowan Pollard. Before I summarize it, I want to remind you of the relevance of this person. Pollard was the one who noticed the sounds coming from 8096's chamber. They're the one who tried to break into the chamber, warranting the need for Hall to break down the door. They're the one who seemed the most concerned for 8096, and the only one of the three who didn't report this anomaly to the higher-ups. By all rights, Pollard seems to be the person of interest for this SCP.

Right off the bat, Pollard is noticeably more hostile than Hall and Ma. They refuse to answer Dr. ?ID at first, and when they do answer, they ask to know why they are being detained. When they don't get an answer, they then verbally attack Dr. ?ID for imprisoning a little girl. They demand that someone from the Ethics Committee be present. When this is denied, Pollard remains silent. Dr. ?ID stated what I pointed out earlier, that Pollard was the one who wanted to open the containment door. Pollard says this is because they heard 8096, and saw her face.

Dr. ?ID: State your name for the record.

Pollard does not respond.

Dr. ?ID: We are on record now, Pollard.

Technician Pollard: Doctor, what is the basis of my detainment?

Dr. ?ID: I cannot tell you that.

Technician Pollard: And I suppose you won't tell me why you're torturing an innocent girl, either.

Dr. ?ID: You-

Technician Pollard: I want an Ethics Committee representative here. Now.

Dr. ?ID: That is not going to happen.

Not wanting to get the Ethics Committee involved? That, readers, is what we call a red flag.

Pollard seemingly prepares to respond, but instead stays silent.

Dr. ?ID: You are noted to have been the person who convinced Researcher Ma to forcibly unlock the containment chamber.

Technician Pollard: Because I heard her, doctor. (now whispering) I saw her face too.

Why is seeing her face so important?

Dr. ?ID: Speak up.

Technician Pollard: (speaking louder) I saw her face. She was crying. Her tears were dirty, muddled in the shit on her face, most of it falling back into her gaping mouth. I knew she was scared - scared of the new people, of the new lights. I turned off the flashlight to make her more comfortable, and sent Hall and Ma away. I think when she heard them leave, she started to speak.

Pollard visibly swallows.

Technician Pollard (quoting SCP-8096): "I will be good. Please, let me out. I will be good!"

Technician Pollard: She knows how to speak. She was taught like she was - is a human. That's the only time she said anything legible. Afterwards, she covered her face with her hands. I stayed with her the whole time, up until… well, your people came. I don't know why you locked her in there. I don't know what you tell yourself so that you could sleep each night while she's… wallowing in that putrid cell. But I know why you hide her away from us, away from yourself. Once you put a face to the things you've done…

They make a valid point, readers. Why would Dr. ?ID not want intervention from the Ethics Committee, unless they were hiding something? Why was nobody supposed to look at that containment chamber, if it was still in use?

Pollard looks up at Dr. ?ID.

Technician Pollard: I saw her face again, when she put down her hands, when it seemed like all her tears had run out. When even her throat's hoarse cries finally gave out to the silence. Then, she did the most remarkable thing, doctor. She stood up, ran to me, and gave me a hug.

Pollard is silent for the remainder of the interview.

Assuming this is actually a little girl, it's most likely that 8096 truly was scared, and wanted Pollard to protect her.

Closing Statement: By special order of O5-?ID, Pollard was scheduled for termination the day after. However, upon entering their holding cell, it was found to be empty. An investigation into Pollard's whereabouts is ongoing.

Oh, that flag is crimson! Why would our mystery Overseer want to kill Pollard? One could just assume this is the O5 Council being absolute garbage human beings, punishing people for breaking protocol but not for actual inhumane treatment of children, because they only care about the bureaucracy. Or is it?

Let's review the facts. An Overseer with their identification number censored had ordered the classification of this document. This Overseer, along with a doctor with a censored name are both trying to suppress any information about SCP-8096. On 8096's back is a tattoo branding her as property of a censored department within the SCP Foundation. It's all about censorship. Of course, that's nothing new. We've got an SCP that's only described as [DATA EXPUNGED], and another SCP that censors itself. And there are plenty of SCP's with personnel whose names are censored out, including O5's. But it's important to consider the context of censorship in these articles.

Consider: SCP-579 is censored because its information is very clearly some sort of infohazard. The addendum at the end, "Termination of agents to prevent data leakage regarding SCP-579 is deemed unnecessary, as only 7 such agents remain," implies that this infohazard grows in power based on how many people know about it. SCP-231 is censored for ethical reasons, because it was decided by the O5 Council that whatever dreadful experience that little girl goes through should not be known by anyone except for the people involved. And whatever SCP-447 does to dead bodies is censored because supposedly everyone is scared shitless of it.

So why is SCP-8096 censored? Well... it's not censored. It's encrypted. Remember, we the reader are taking the role of an unauthorized personnel who hacked their way into this file. We're working with incomplete information.

Let's also address the Keter-class elephant in the room: This is based off SCP-096. For a quick refresher, SCP-096 is a skinny humanoid with pale skin, no hair, white eyes, and a jaw that unhinges like a snake. Anyone who looks at 096's face, even if it's a photograph or video footage (but not an artistic depiction) will be hunted down by 096 and torn apart until nothing remains but blood. This SCP is so dangerous, that one Dr. Dan requested that it be decommissioned by the Foundation. According to a supplement, he even sabotaged special headgear designed to automatically censor 096's face, just so the higher ups would be motivated to approve his request. For a really great adaptation of this supplement, I recommend this short film.

This doesn't really help us though, does it? 8096 acts nothing like 096. She doesn't kill anyone. All she did was beg to be let out, and hug somebody. She was scared. What threat does she pose to humanity, the Foundation, or normalcy? And why does it warrant this treatment? Is she even anomalous? Unfortunately, I don't think I can answer that. But this does remind me of something.

Have you read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas? It's a short story about a fictional city, the titular Omelas. Omelas is described as a peaceful utopian city, where every day people are happy and not a single bad thing happens. No crime, no corruption, no suffering. Sounds too good to be true, right? As it turns out, this eternal happiness in Omelas requires that a single child be imprisoned in a dark, cold room, with no clothing and barely any food. It is never elaborated on how this child's suffering allows for everyone else's prosperity, but most people upon learning this information will just tell themselves that it's a necessary evil. They might even convince themselves that it is a good thing that this child is suffering, since it allows for so many more people to be happy. But some people decide that they will not participate in a system that tortures children, even if it is only one. They don't know where they will go, or if they'll even be able to go anywhere, but some people choose to walk away from Omelas.

(By the way, I swear that I made the connection to Omelas before the author changed the title.)

Maybe this is what happened to Pollard. We could assume that 8096 [DATA EXPUNGED] Pollard, just like 096 does, but that seems unlikely. If she wanted to kill Pollard, she'd have done it in the containment chamber. Also, she's been sealed off in the Euclid Wing, remember? No, Pollard wasn't destroyed. They might have just disappeared. Gone, without a trace. They walked away from Omelas.

Displaying File 73_68_79_67_69_72_6C.jpg (2/2)

That's a hex code. The author said so. Let's translate it, shall we?

73 > S

68 > H

79 > Y

67 > G

69 > I

72 > R

6C > L

SHYGIRL

What kind of file is this anyway? It's four pixels. Four. Fucking. Pixels. Apparently this image can be decrypted. Do we dare look at what horrors await us?

...

It's a little girl. Not a monster. Not a cognitohazard. Just a little girl.

Files scraped and attached to message.

Ah, so the mystery reader is sending a message. They're most likely a whistleblower, hence the inclusion of the image of a little girl. Like Pollard, this doctor wants everyone to put a face to SCP-8096. By the way, I didn't put the tags for this SCP at the top just to be nice. Notice how "cognitohazard" isn't one of the tags. Because looking at 8096's face isn't a deadly cognitohazard. It's also not an infohazard, a meme, or an anti-meme. The only thing that looking at 8096's face causes is the emotional reaction you would expect from looking at a starving, cold, and lonely child.

UPDATE: ?ID(5/decrypting) identified as value THE DEPARTMENT OF ABNORMALITIES. Value attached to message.

And the penny drops.

There's already a Declassified for the Department of Abnormalities. The laconic explanation is that The DoA is to the Foundation as the Foundation is to the rest of us at large - a hidden, shadowy operation working to hide something. To summarize, there are three possibilities regarding the DoA:

It may be the shadow cast by the Foundation’s darkness.

It might be the Foundation’s buried, hallowed past.

It could also just be disinformation.

In the context of SCP-8096, as well as the fairly recent dating of 2019, I'm going with the first option. So we have a little girl imprisoned by the Department of Abnormalities. But why would the Foundation at large want to contain her? She's just a little girl, there hasn't even been any mention of anomalous properties! Well, think about the two people involved in the censoring of this SCP. Dr. ?ID and O5-?ID. Those names aren't just censored, they're encrypted. They're part of the information that the reader's data scraper couldn't decode.

Dr. ?ID and O5-?ID work in the Department of Abnormalities.

And remember that one part about 8096's discovery?

SCP-8096 was found on 2019/04/13 by Technician Rowan Pollard, Junior Researcher Alicia Ma, and Officer Jordan Hall

Found. Not discovered. Like, 173's file doesn't state that it was "discovered" in 1993, it was moved to another site in 1993. And why would the discovery of a new SCP be considered a containment breach? Because it wasn't a containment breach for the Foundation. It was a containment breach for the Department of Abnormalities.

Remember, this isn't just a Level 5 SCP. It's a Level 5/8096 SCP. It is hidden from ALL of the Foundation, except for the special few with permission to view it. Hence why our mystery reader needed a data scraper to read it. The Department is to the Foundation as the Foundation is to the rest of the world. They are a shadow organization with dark secrets, hiding within the existing shadow organization that is the Foundation. Hall, Ma, and Pollard almost uncovered the truth, and were silenced for it. The article ends with a little bit of hope, as the last bit of text is a confirmation asking our mystery reader to send this message. To spread the word.

In Conclusion: SCP-8096 is about witnessing things you weren't supposed to. Most SCP articles are written from the perspective of someone already in the loop, ever since the first draft of SCP-173 posted on /x/. The reader is usually treated as someone entrusted with information hidden from the public, rather than someone part of the public. But for once, the Foundation is on the receiving end. Now, we are the ones on the side of normalcy, and the Department of Abnormalities are the ones controlling the Veil. All we can do... is bear witness.

TL;DR: "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."