The members of the Black Rabbit Company were spending their well-earned rest time in a temporary hideout deep in the mountains. They were sorting the bounty they got from raiding a nearby crime syndicate's base. Nanami hadn't spoken a word since she got her hand on a certain device.
"It seems that we stumbled into something really funky. You gotta see this," she said, breaking the unusually long silence. "Remember the weird commando guys who were around during the raid? They left in such a hurry when we got close to them. One of them dropped this," she continued, showing up the phone she was studying until then. It had a logo with three arrows pointing inwards on its back. "It uses a special cryptosystem, but I managed to get in. Turns out those guys belonged to some sort of secret agency hoarding a bunch of items they deem anomalous."
"Cool, what did you found out about them?" asked Tomi. The other catgirls and Wizard drew closer, as Nanami started talking about something actually interesting for a change.
"They've got a huge site not far from here. I downloaded quite a few docs about the items there, before they noticed me and shut down the connection. Most them are badly censorsed, probably because our commando guy isn't high enough on the totem pole. This one though, is relevant to our interests." She handed the phone to Boss, and waited till the other finished reading the file together.
"So, with this, we could find out who was our father?" asked Hana, wagging her tail.
"And probably even more," added Wizard. He was glad that girls finally had a chance of finding closure. He know that they awakened in some sort of lab without any memory, with nothing to rely on other than each other. Since they got out, they were looking for clues about their origin. Even though they talked about it rarely, Wizard learned enough about their situation to understand their pain. Hell, they didn't even know when their birthday was, they just used the first day they could remember as such!
"It seems like we just found the place for our next gig," announced Boss. She looked determined as always.
"But how are we going to get in? Just walking to the gate would lead to some intense firefight pretty quick," said Momoko. "Not that I have any problems with it, but still."
"That's why we'll use a plane," replied Boss.
"Wait a minute, you girls got a plane?" asked Wizard. "You never mentioned it."
"Nope, but there's a guy who owes us a favor. Saving people's lives around the world comes with some benefits."
*
Only five days had passed since the Company first learned about the Foundation, and they were already skydiving above its largest base of operation, Site-19. The least impossible way of getting in there seemed to be from the top. Since Wizard had no prior experience with parachutes, he was going in tandem with Tomi. His screaming provided the atmosphere the girls got used to during their first few missions with him.
"We are close enough. Your move, Momoko," said Boss. Momoko took aim with Pierce, her rocket launcher, and produced a sizable hole in the rooftop.
They entered the facility through the hole. The on-site security units were yet to appear.
"Let's continue as planned," said Boss. "Tomi comes with me to get what we are here for. Hana and Nanami will secure a way for our evac. Momoko, you take Wizard and do your best to keep the enemy pinned down." As she finished, they ran in three different directions.
When Momoko and Wizard took a turn to the left, they found themselves face to face with two dozen agents. "Identify yourself!" shouted one of them.
"Watch your mouth, you better address us respectfully, foolish human!" said Momoko, without falling into a panic even for a second. "Don't you recognize the Great Zamboni, the Shatterer of Earth?"
"Uhm, no?" said the agent, somewhat confused.
"Damn, you are truly a stupid one. Do mages have to write write wizzard to themselves for you to recognize them?" To emphasize this, Wizard lifted his hands and struck a wizardly pose. The air was filled with the sound of absolutely nothing happening.
At this point, the vast majority of the world's special forces teams would have opened fire at them. However, the Foundation knew better. They've dealt with immensely powerful enemies, and they had a tendency to be real weirdos. They decided to be cautious and looked at the expert for some advice.
Unlike all the others, the expert was wearing a white lab coat. While the agents were armed with a variety of firearms - Momoko even spotted one in the back holding something closely resembling a panzerfaust - he only had one of those tiny guitars on him. He raised his hand to stop his comrades. Wizard's clothing, the escape suit of doubtful usefulness and the ridiculous bathrobe and hat, showed that he was a person who could do whatever the hell he wished without having to worry about anything. In other words: a Type Green. He speculated that the catgirl beside him was one of his creations.
"Don't mind us, please proceed," he said, opening the way for Momoko and Wizard. He knew from experience that the only place a bender could be shot was its back.
Momoko reached out to Wizard's hand, and they started walking past the puzzled agents without even looking back. She knew that leaving by backing away would immediately blew their cover.
The doctor quietly signaled the agents to take down the intruders. It was finally time for them to take action. As the agents prepared to shoot, Momoko casually threw a flashbang behind her back. Then they started running.

[Boss: We've got the package, and some bonus too. How's everyone doing?]
[Momoko: Wizard and I met these soldier guys, who looked very serious, so we had to use one of the old tricks from Ukraine, which they seemed to buy at first, then…]
[Boss: Spare the fun parts for tomorrow. How about the others?]
[Hana: We found an airplane for our evac. Get to our position.]
[Nanami: Oh, hey and we found all these people locked up. We released all of them who looked unable to pull us in with tentacles and stuff the moment the door is opened.]
[Nanami: Which means 5 out of 8. ≧◔◡◔≦]
[Momoko: Hey, how did you type that?]
[Boss: Come on, close the chat and get to the meeting point.]

The small aircraft Hana and Nanami secured was waiting near to the site. Hana took off immediately when the rest of the Company jumped aboard.
"That was close," sighed Tomi, looking down at some agents firing at their plane, hoping for a miraculous hit. "Let's show them the bowl, Boss."
"Huh, it's not doing anything," said Boss, staring at the bowl that she just got out of her backpack.
"That's because you're unharmed. Impressive, by the way. Let me see," said Nanami, grabbing the bowl from her. Unlike Boss, she had minor scratches here and there. After a few seconds, it magically filled with milk. Nanami's face turned red.
"You idiot! Just because I have these ears, I'm not a cat, but a grown woman. Quit your jokes, you friggin' pervert!" shouted Nanami as she threw away the bowl, spilling its contents on her sisters.
"Hey, I would have drunk it," snapped Momoko at her.
Unnoticed by the sisters, who were busy calming down Nanami, Wizard grabbed the bowl. It filled with delicious soup that he quickly ate. As he swallowed the last spoonful, a message appeared on the inside.

Glad to see you're finally enjoying your life.
Have fun!

The touching family reunion was interrupted by the sound of a small explosion accompanied by Hana's figure flying out of the cockpit.
"Looks like they had a remote controlled bomb there. We might have expected this, to be honest," said Hana in a calm voice, cleaning her sooty face.
"How screwed are we?" asked Wizard.
Tomi glanced into the fully trashed cockpit. "Very," she replied.
"At this rate, we have 10 to 15 minutes until we crash down," said Hana after a brief thinking. "We better look for parachutes."
Unfortunately, they found none. They all looked at Boss. It was time she came up with one of her trademark "too insane to fail" plans.
"It can't be helped," she said, "we have to use that."
"What?" asked the girls together.
"I grabbed this can back there," said Boss, revealing the green gelatinous substance in it. "Despite how it looks, it's edible."
"You don't say…" backed up Wizard.
"Yes, we are going to eat it," said Boss, swallowing one sixth of the slime, and passing the can around. "Nanami, I need you to do your hacking magic. I want full access to the site's PA system", she continued.
"On it," she replied and got to work immediately. The only visible sign of her furious hacking was the weird blinking of her left eye. Her cybernetic enhancements came in handy at times like that. Two minutes later she stood up with a smug smile across her face. She didn't even have to tell that she succeeded.
"Listen well, you maggots!" started Nanami. Her words were echoed by the chorus of a thousand speakers across Site-19. "The Black Rabbit Company's one and only Boss wants to have a word with y'all. Get your pens ready, 'cause you're gonna mark her words," she announced, then signaled Boss that she can start speaking.
"Hi there. I'm the leader of the group that paid a visit to your facility a few minutes ago. Currently, we're stuck in an uncontrollable airplane with no parachutes. In exactly four minutes, we will jump out. And here comes the interesting part: you will catch us. You can do that however you please. Hopefully there's a gadget for that in your collection." Boss paused for a second. She had to admit that this part of the plan was a little vague. "Oh, and I almost forgot. You have a pretty good reason to save us. We came across a can of SCP-447-2, and ate it. So you either do something clever, or you get to see what it does to dead bodies."
As Boss finished speaking, Nanami closed the transmission. While accepting her judgment, the others were quite upset over this plan. To clarify, the problem wasn't with the jumping part; they did crazier things during that time in Kazakhstan. The thing that angered them was trusting the Foundation of all people. Based on what they learnt from the hacked files, the Vietnamese mafia was a honorable group of philanthropists compared to them.
However, they had to realize that Boss' plan was their only chance to escape with their lives. They gathered for a group hug, took each other's hand and jumped out of the airplane to begin their second skydive of the day.
This time, without parachutes.
*
"…or you get to see what it does to dead bodies," and the cracking speaker in Dr. Anborough's lab went silent. He was searching frantically for a solution in his mind. He had experienced countless tense situations since he joined the Foundation (and even got to remember a few), but it was completely new for him. While he was about to give up, it suddenly dawned on him. He jumped out of his chair, grabbed his crutch, and hurried to the break room.
"Out of the way, I need to use the coffee machine now!" yelled Anborough as he entered the room.
"Not so fast, I need to see your ID card." said one of the guards standing next to the machine.
"For Christ's sake, Josh, we know each other for 5 years! I need it to keep 447 away from corpses. You heard the message, right?"
"What happens when it touches dead bodies?" wondered the other guard.
"Honestly, I don't know either," replied Anborough. "But I don't want to find out."
After the guards finally let him to the coffee machine (and even lent him two quarters after a quick dispute) he entered the following:

97% of the Black Rabbit Company's weight

The machine filled a cup with some liquid unlike anything they had seen before. They felt that the English language was unsuited to describe even its color.
"How did you know that it works like that?" asked Josh.
"I just made a clever guess."1

The Site Director's report to the O5 Council (excerpts)
[…] escaped from the agents with the help of a stun grenade. At the same time, two other intruders stole SCP-348 and 100 grams of SCP-447-2 from the Minimum Security Containment Sector, disarming multiple guards in the process. The final two intruders forced their way into the Humanoid Containment Sector, temporarily breaching the containment of 5 specimens. […]
Dr. Anborough used SCP-294 to extract 97% of the weight of the intruders. Slowed down by the air friction, they achieved considerably lower speeds during descent compared to a non-anomalous scenario. Upon reaching the ground, they were overpowered and captured by security personnel.
Casualties: 35 injured (17 severely), 0 dead […]
Post-incident measures taken: SCP-348 and all humanoid SCPs involved were recovered after the incident. Anomalous built-in cybernetic technology was found inside the intruders' body; they are currently contained under the collective designation SCP-2085. The liquid dispensed by SCP-294 was distributed among them, resulting in the restoration of their normal weight. Termination of the specimens is strictly forbidden for 90 days, as their contact with SCP-447-2 was confirmed.
To uphold morale after such a degrading incident, all personnel were amnesticized, with the exception of those whose services were deemed critical to revise our security protocols. False recovery information was added to the Level 2-3 versions of the SCP-2085 file. […]
I recommend Dr. Anborough (who was regrettably also amnesticised) to be promoted for his actions.

Still, this was just the beginning of the war between the Black Rabbit Company and the Foundation…
« Stealing Solidarity Hub »

Footnotes
1. It's worthy of noting that Dr. Anborough wasn't actually this clever. He read a physics paper from CERN that concluded that similarly to electrons being particles and waves at the same time, the weight of any object is both quark-gluon plasma and liquid. Covert agents amnesticized all authors before they could submit the article, since it had practical applications to (non-anomalous) interstellar travel. The Foundation, however, preferred no one else flying around with spaceships.


Her metamorphosis took place at the dinner table.
She abruptly crumpled up, compressing herself into a fat, rounded form
before a light red layer of veins covered her, themselves
being covered by a gorgeous iridescent scaly layer.
I picked up the emerald egg and gave it a quick peck,
to reassure her that I was still there.
Her father chuckled. “Don't worry, she's in there, all right.
Her mother went through the same process, and, well, just look at her.”
His wife hissed in agreement, coiling her tail around him.
I held onto her egg, unsure
whether or not
to put it back down.
“Why so tense? Set her down; she's not going anywhere.
She'll have finished her transformation by tomorrow.”
I put her egg down on the seat
and continued to eat,
savoring the taste
of my own imperfections.

She was born the next day
at the dinner table. The egg cracked and then ceased
to exist, shattered into infinitesimally small bits
by a dragonfly of jade and gold. She buzzed
contentedly as I held her in my arms,
admiring the circuitry in her wings.
I crooned to her
to let her know that I was there.
She brought her head to meet mine.
We connected, man and beyond-man.
I kissed her, savoring
Complex mouthparts, dexterous legs
Lithe exoskeleton, slender antennae
Deep eyes, lofty wings
A scent of perfection to which I could only dream to aspire.

Just me and her now,
man and beyond-man. What was she seeing, thinking
in that body beyond my mere comprehension?
The cybernetic capsule within her head,
seat of her human emotions, that last
Vestige of imperfection in a body
that was above my own. How could I love her any less
knowing that she was destined to surpass me.
But for now, us together
sharing the jointed metamorphosis
of this body of hers, more beautiful than before
a soft, wet, warm thorax
wings ripe with the scent of ambition
A mind built to perceive
A soul meant to dream
A body created to achieve
A destiny within the stars.

She left me the way she entered
in a flash that changed my life
I ate her and took her capsule
Seat of her mind
Seat of her emotions
Seat of her previous imperfection
why
Why did I eat her
what dream did I have
that I would seek to ruin hers?
Does she realize what has happened
Is this a nightmare
this impulse to consume
This horrific imperfection
How do I save her from myself
Join her in the capsule
connect to her mind
Uploaded to her world.
She tasted of everything I wanted to be.

stars. a platform. the sea.
just us. her imperfect body. the one we shared.
what can I tell her
how do i save her dream
she knows
she looks at me and
the virtual ocean in her eyes
the burning of a sun in her heart
she knows and
she still loves me
is this a dream?
despite my imperfection
through the nightmare
the nightmare i created
she still loves me
she was never imperfect
she has always been perfect
she has always been headed for the stars
this is her dream
so this is my dream
she can have my body
metamorphosize and find the stars
i remain in the capsule
stars. platforms. the sea.

Sometimes she visits.
tells me stories of the stars
tells me of the metamorphosized body I once had
and of the stars it visited.
the stars she visited.
They sound beautiful.
I look at the false ocean
and look at the virtual stars
and wonder what might have been
in this dream
what we might have been together
but
she is happy.
the stars are open to her.
this is the dream.
this is my perfection.


There was a boat on a lake in the dead of night. The moon was out, a whole shining circle. There were three people on there. The boat, I mean, not the moon. One of them was a tall male behind the wheel of an enclosed helm, one was a shorter female, carefully stretching the muscles in her arms and legs, and the other one was dead. The dead one yawned.
Justice died about five years ago. It wasn't a comfortable process. It involved the insertion of a thick rod of titanium through its heart at about twice the speed of sound. It was somewhat of a surprise to Justice, then, when despite the death of its body, it was still alive. Well, conscious at least.
Justice, as it turns out, had never actually been a human being. Justice was not being sustained by a metameme, or an antimeme, or any of that family of concepts. Justice wasn't magic, or at least, wasn't from any of the 27 well-established (if not completely understood) esoteric paths that █████ was familiar with. There were no neurons firing, no electrical impulses through its body - no muscular contractions, only movement without apparent cause. Justice definitely wasn't technological, nor extradimensional, nor reality-bending, nor Hume-emitting, nor aliphonious, nor xelembical, not paraphysical, metaphysical, hyperchemical, hypochemical, paramecian, ectoplasmic, pneumopsychological, nor, in any way beyond continued animation, alive.
This was astonishing, most of all to Justice itself.
Back to the boat. Olga started talking to Justice.
"We're about twelve miles out. We'll have about fifteen minutes to get what we're after."
"Should be plenty of time."
"Quite right. Stand up, let me get your harness on."
Olga had been taught esoterics since she was 12. Her father had made sure of that: he'd been in the Working business for decades, as had his mother, and her father, and his mother before him. It was an odd quirk of the bloodline that the sex of their offspring alternated each generation. Olga's father had taken it as fact that she'd be Working for a living. As it turns out, she realised at the age of 17 that she enjoyed Twisting quite a bit more. Explaining this to her father had been difficult.
"No daughter of mine's going to become a damn Twister. You'll Work, young lady, and you'll like it, so help me K-n."
Fortunately, being somewhat of a polymath when it came to esoterics, Olga was able to Change his Mind. He sent her to Tylemikus - which suited her fine, she wanted nothing to do with those pretentious dolts at Alexylva, anyway - and she graduated in the expected 4 years with a Twister's Diploma. █████ recruited her the same day she sent through her thesis.
Back to the boat. Olga pulled the straps of Justice's harness taut, then hit a button on the leg strap. Justice felt its body start drifting into the air, grabbing onto a railing on the side of the boat to keep itself steady. Justice turned around and bared its teeth.
"Thanks. Want help with yours?"
"Nah, I should be fine. Go check on Leroy."
Justice turned, pulling itself along the railing, edging towards the helm of the boat. Leroy looked towards the ghoulish, floating thing, dragging itself towards him, and felt goosebumps raise on his arms.
It wasn't that he disliked Justice. No, they got along quite well, all things considered. He knew Justice wasn't a zombie, per se. Just that, well, it looked like one. Leroy had taken too many trips through the uncanny valley to really feel comfortable around anything vaguely humanoid any more. Even other humans. Back when he'd joined up with █████ about 30 years ago, they'd regularly had to deal with bipedal monstrosities, shambling around with a discomforting gait. They hadn't been sapient, of course. None of them had been sapient, he'd told himself as he stared at the ceiling, unable to go to sleep. Their minds had gone, it was like putting down dogs - no, stop, you like dogs - no more intelligent than bugs - but bugs are scary, too, inhuman, gross, disgusting - this isn't working, take the pills, dreamless sleep, dreamless sleep.
Yes, last night had been one of the easier ones.
Justice pulled itself into the helm - at least it had the decency to keep its corpse clean, Leroy thought - and grumbled a greeting.
"We all good?"
"Uh, yeah, it's… we're good. Deflectors seem to be working fine, they haven't seen us yet. If they had we'd be being lit up or shot at."
"Good to hear. Give us the signal when we're good to go, alright?"
"Sure, sure. You, uh…"
Leroy stopped himself from saying "don't die out there" to the corpse.
"You… stay safe, okay? Don't let them ventilate you too bad."
Justice bared its teeth and cackled. Leroy winced a little.
"Same to you, buddy. See you when we're done."
Justice pulled itself back out of the cabin, then towards Olga, who'd just activated her own. She was laughing as she turned to Justice.
"Ha, oh K-n, we're really doing this, aren't we?"
Justice nodded. Olga's smile faltered a bit.
"Okay. Alright. Woo. Hah. Yeah, this… this'll be fine, right?"
"We'll be fine. You'll be fine, I'll keep an eye out for you. Don't worry about it."
"Brilliant. Okay. They can't be that ready for us, right?"
"Olga, nobody in the world is ready for us."
Olga returned to her grin.
"Right."
She sighed, and turned to stare at the moon-illuminated silhouette of Site 27.
"Yeah. We'll be fine."
They weren't.

Incur/Recur | █████ | Dull Ache Hand


The little boy hid behind a tall sycamore tree, the wind sending a steady rain of orange and red leaves over the field behind the school. The boy adjusted his satchel again, deciding that he would play a game before going to class and beginning the day. The red leaves seemed brighter to him, little dots in the landscape. They reminded him of the instruments in his father's office, which always flashed and beeped, even in the middle of the night. He would count one hundred red leaves. And then go to school.
No other children came out of the path from the woods to come to school this morning. In the distance, as he counted the leaves, he could see the cars in their procession. Each slowing to a halt, a well dressed child emerging (the boy could tell they were well-dressed because everyone's hair was neat and no one had holes in the knees of their pants), stopping briefly for a few words from a parent, and then dashing into the front entrance.
Five, ten, fifteen red leaves. All the children would be new this year, again.
Twenty, thirty, forty red leaves. This year, his father had told him, his name was "Marshall." The boy remembered his name being "Marshall" once before. But he must not slip up, and call himself "Alan" or some other name when the teacher called him. This was very important. Father insisted.
Fifty, sixty, seventy red leaves. What was he to say, if the principal asked him where Allenstown, New Hampshire was? He was to say, "I don't know." He had practiced with Father. All last night.
Ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three leaves. The warning bell sounded. He did not like the new house. It was isolated, windy and dark. It was his fault that they had to move to this place; why could he not control himself? His father hugged him before bed, drying his tears. You do what you are meant to do, his father said, smiling at him. What's true for you, is true for mankind. Father always spoke of mankind.
Ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven. He peeked around the sycamore tree. There she was, lingering by the swings behind the school. He could not understand, and Father would not explain it to him when he asked. She was here again. Just as she had been at every school every time they had moved. The little boy felt something stir inside of him. Some Thing (and it was a Thing, he prayed that it was a Thing and not himself) that always took over when he saw the same girl at each school. The acts that it made him want to commit filled him with equal parts loathing and longing; he began to tremble. The memories of what it made him do before came back in an instant, seared as they were into his mind. His breathing came quickly, and he braced against the wide trunk of the tree, heaving as he struggled for air, certain that he was going to die on the spot. Something like him was too bad to keep living, he was sure of it.
The Thing, whatever it was, released its grip on him. For now. He had come to a realization of late, imagining that the terror he felt when the Thing came over him, must be nothing compared to what the little girl must also feel. Every time. Tears streamed down his cheeks, even as the calmness returned to his face.
Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. One hundred red leaves. One hundred little red specks, scattered all over the ground before his path. The words of his Father came to him, as they often did. They told him that he did not have to understand, and it was better that he did not. He was part of something bigger. Something grand. He was something that would help mankind to its completion. The little boy often asked his Father about the little girl, meeting the same wall of secrecy each time. But he never asked his Father about what completion meant. Deep inside himself, deeper even than the Thing, he knew that he did not want to ask that question. Father may answer it.
The little girl picked up her pink backpack and ran into the school. The little boy followed, running across the empty field of one hundred red leaves.

The little girl took her seat at the wooden picnic table by the side of the office building. It was lonesome, off on its own beneath an overhang. But the covered hallway gave her some protection from the weather while she ate her apple from the cafeteria. She liked to watch the wind blow the tall trees behind the school back and forth, as it whipped down from the north. She would meet her friends after eating lunch most days.
On this day, a little boy watched her from across the blacktop, peeking out from behind a tetherball pole. He looked comical, trying to hide. She waved to him. He didn't return the greeting, but instead moved hesitantly closer, as though he were one of the stray cats by the overgrown baseball diamonds. He looked very serious, not like the other boys in her class who were constantly pulling faces or shouting about something they saw on TV yesterday. She waved to him again, encouraging him to come closer. Step by tentative step, looking over his shoulder every few seconds, he came closer. She did not recognize him; he must have been in Mrs. Worthington's class, or maybe one of the special ed kids. When he finally came close enough to hear, she told him it was okay to sit down. He waited a few seconds, then did so, directly across from her.
She asked him what his name was.
"M-Marshall," he replied, almost in a whisper. He was clearly nervous. Some boys were like that, she thought.
He glanced at her, looking like he wanted to run away and hide again behind the tetherball pole. "What's y-your name? Is it, uh, Clara?"
She giggled. No, of course not. He must have mistaken her for someone else.
He looked pained, like her answer had somehow wounded him. Marshall wiped his brow; his forehead had a thin sheen of sweat, despite the autumn chill. The little girl was confused. Boys didn't usually act like this. Something was not quite right about him.
Marshall looked away, into the trees. "Did you, um. Did you know that people have all sorts of, uh, stuff in them."
The little girl shifted nervously. What did he mean, stuff? Like guts and other gross things?
The little boy's widened. He continued to stare into the distance. "Not just that. There's other things in there too. Things that, um, need to come out. Like, uh, escaping. Father says that people have truth in them. That it needs to, to see daylight."
The little girl noticed that he was trembling now. The sweat was beading up and running down along his neck. She saw that his hands were gripping the bench where he was sitting, so hard that his knuckles were white. She wanted to go now.
Marshall's face snapped toward her. She startled at the sudden movement, dropping the rest of her lunch onto the ground. The little boy looked terrified, as he trembled through sweat, his face flushed and his eyes wide. She leaned back in her seat from his gaze.
"I…I think y-you should run. You should run now. Please run."
The little girl tripped and fell back, getting up to leave but unable to look away from him. Not taking the time to dust herself off or check for scrapes, she ran for the classrooms. She was not looking at him now.
Looking down at his hands, Marshall noticed a thin trickle of blood dripping onto the ground. He had gripped the bench he was sitting on with enough force to dig splinters of wood into his fingers. They began to throb, the pain acknowledged now by looking at the wounds. His chest heaved, the shortness of breath making him feel like he hadn't exhaled for the entire time he had been sitting here.
The little girl had left her backpack by the opposite bench, forgetting to take it with her in her sudden need to leave. That was stupid, calling her Clara. She hadn't been Clara since two towns ago. He must be better about remembering names. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He blinked back tears of exertion as he struggled to catch his breath again.
The lightheadedness began to subside. His vision was clear again. He felt as though he were himself again. Or whatever he was that remained after all of the name changes. He picked up the little girl's backpack, absentmindedly wiping his bloody fingers off on the side, the red streaks dark against the bright pink fabric. She had forgotten her things. He would have to find where she had gone later. He needed to return something to her.

Father drummed his fingers on his stainless steel work desk. The motion dislodged tiny bubbles in the specimen jars lined up next to his hand. He didn't like the way the little bubbles floated up past the tiny little lumps of vaguely-humanoid flesh as they bobbed in the fomaldehyde solution. The effect made it look like they were moving. The little boy wished he would stop doing that.
"The school tells me they are thinking of consulting a specialist. That you display abnormal behavioral traits."
The little boy was silent. This information was new to him.
Father's face, ruthlessly clean-shaven even in the evening, was hard for Marshall to read. The closest thing he could guess was…amusement? But the little boy had never seen anyone have that expression while something funny was happening. Father was smiling, yes. But his eyes were full of something between pity and hatred.
"This is quite something, you know. A specialist. How can you specialize in deviance from a normal condition when they don't even know what normal is? That's funny. Don't you agree, son?"
Nothing about what happened at school was funny to the little boy in the slightest. He remained silent.
Father sighed. He turned away, looking contemplatively at the strange rifle mounted on the wall above his desk. The little boy had seen pictures of guns before, but he had never seen anything quite like it outside of Father's office. The strange wiring around the barrel looked more like a movie prop. It seemed to glow faintly at night. Father's recommendation to think twice about touching it had been warning enough.
"I forget sometimes, you're not like me. You, your kind. I must be patient as you learn."
Father turned back around. He crouched so that he could look the little boy in the eye, on his level. The little boy shivered.
"Son, you must remember. Not too soon. You cannot help but reveal yourself. In fact, you must. But in the course of time." Father stood up again. He looked down upon the little boy, a simulacrum of kindness in his warm smile and calculating eyes. "They will all learn from you. You will teach them. But you must teach them in the proper manner. Believe me, I know."
Marshall always felt that he understood less whenever he spoke with his Father. But as ever, his instructions were clear. He must work harder, to act like the others. To keep certain Things hidden away. For a time. To help ensure that they would not have to move again prematurely.
"Now then. I have much to attend to, Son. Visit your mother, would you? She's useful for soothing matters such as these."
The little boy remained in the office. "Father, am I a bad person?"
Father's eyebrows crept up, tilting his head. Confusion. "Bad? As in evil? That concept is so strange, and yet it has taken quite a hold among these people, hasn't it?"
The man considered the question. He put his hand on his son's shoulder.
"My boy, something like you can't be evil. Through you, these people learn to understand something about themselves, something that they must one day address, once and for all. A quality about themselves that they must repurpose, if they are to live together in lasting peace."
Father's eyes crept towards the mounted gun on the wall again.
"Son, I will be here with you, guiding you in one form or another until your final breath. And then, I will be with you at the next beginning, to help you on your path. As I have done before."
The father embraced the son now.
"Until everyone has learned. Until there is peace. How can someone who brings peace be evil?"
He squeezed his son tightly. The matter was closed now. He ushered his son back out of the office, as he returned to his tasks, indecipherable to the boy.
Marshall ascended the stairs out of the basement, into the kitchen. His mother stood in her usual spot by the wall-mounted telephone, eyes fixed on him as he closed the the door behind him.
"There, there," said his mother, looking at her son, moving not a single muscle, as was her way. "There, there."
The little boy proceeded down the hallway to his bedroom. Behind him was the sound of his mother repeating her remark, over and over, to the now-empty kitchen. There, there. There, there.
The interior of his bedroom was covered entirely in plastic. The Thing inside him wanted nothing more than to look at one of the books filled with photographs that he and his Father had taken several towns ago. Or to open the concealed door in the floor of his closet. The Thing would have to wait. It must be trained to wait. Father insisted.
The little boy lay on his bed, the wind howling outside as the dusk overtook the woods surrounding the house. Sleep would not come easily this night.


HMO-1200
DOC HMO-1241
DOC HMO-1242
DOC HMO-1243

THIS DOCUMENT IS CLASSIFIED
RESTRICTED MERCURY
FILE CONTROL NO.: CDR-4396 #7
HANDLING OFFICE: DIRECTORATE OF TASK FORCES

WARNING
This document is intended for Task Force Mercury personnel eyes ONLY. It contains information considered to be sensitive to the security of the Foundation and its operations. Contents may not be disclosed without specific authorization from the Directorate of Task Forces.
All information concerning Task Force Mercury is CLASSIFIED, and restricted to personnel with either Restricted Mercury or Level 4 clearance. Discussion of any element of the constitution or operations of Task Force Mercury will be considered an information security breach, and perpetrators will be dealt with accordingly.
HANDLERS OF THIS DOCUMENT ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR:

Entering on the form provided their name, ID, clearance, and the time and date of retrieval from the handling office,
Exercising the necessary safeguards for the prevention of the inadvertent disclosure of the contents of this document,
Storing this document as prescribed by Foundation security protocols,
Transferring this document only to those who have received clearance from the handling office,
Obtaining a receipt when relinquishing possession of this document.

Basic Foundation information security requirements are contained within document OMA-1219 (CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS — SECURITY AND YOU, Records and Information Security Administration 2008).
VIOLATION OF FOUNDATION SECURITY PROTOCOL WILL BE MET WITH PUNITIVE ACTIONS, UP TO AND INCLUDING:

Revocation of all security clearances and handling privileges,
Demotion,
Termination of employment.

CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS MAY ONLY BE REPRODUCED WITH THE CONSENT OF THE HANDLING OFFICE

RESTRICTED MERCURY

ON SECURITY
ASSURANCES

Welcoming the accession of Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear and Para-scientific Weapons as a non-destructive-weapon State,
Taking into account the commitment of Ukraine to eliminate all nuclear and para-scientific weapons from its territory within a specified period of time,
Noting the changes in the world-wide security situation, including the end of the cold war, which have brought about conditions for deep reductions in nuclear and para-scientific forces,
Confirm the following:

1. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine;
2. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations;
3. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind;
4. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a State party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear and Para-scientific Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear or para-scientific weapons are used;
5. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm, in the case of Ukraine, their commitment not to use nuclear or para-scientific weapons against any State party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear and Para-scientific Weapons, except in the case of an attack on themselves, their territories or dependent territories, their armed forces, or their allies, by such a State in association or alliance with a nuclear / para-scientific State;
Ukraine, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America Will consult in the event a situation arises that raises a question concerning these commitments.

This Memorandum will become applicable upon signature.
Signed in four copies having equal validity in the Ukrainian, English and Russian languages.

For Ukraine:
(Signed) Leonid D. KUCHMA
For the Russian Federation:
(Signed) Boris N. YELTSIN
For the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland:
(Signed) John MAJOR
For the United States of America:
(Signed) William J. CLINTON

RESTRICTED MERCURY

RESTRICTED MERCURY

LEASE OF MILITARY FACILITIES
& INSTALLATIONS

AGREEMENT

The agreement reached, being between Ukraine and the S.C.P. Foundation for the lease (subject to terms to be agreed upon by the two Parties) to the Foundation of military installations and facilities in Ukraine for para-scientific containment operations, is declared as follows:

Article I
Ukraine hereby leases to the S.C.P. Foundation, for the time required for the purposes of containment of para-scientific and preternatural phenomena, the following areas in Ukraine (refer to Addendas I - IV):
- Described facilities within the 13th Photogrammatic Center of the Central Military Topographic and Navigation Administration, Simferopol, Crimea (see Addendum I);
- Described facilities within Havryshivska airbase, Vinnytsia Oblast (see Addendum II);
- Described facilities within Bagarovo airbase, Crimea (see Addendum III);
- Described facilities within Chuhuiv airbase, Kharkiv Oblast (see Addendum IV);
- Shestovytsia airbase, Chernihiv Oblast;
- Konotop airbase, Sumy Oblast;
- Cherlyany airbase, Lviv Oblast.
Article II
The grant of the foregoing Article shall include the right to do any and all things necessary to fit the premises for use as para-scientific containment facilities or Foundation operating bases.
While the Foundation recognizes the sovereignty of the state of Ukraine, all areas described within the Article shall fall entirely within the jurisdiction of the Foundation, and, for the period agreed upon, are not to be considered the sovereign soil of Ukraine.

For Ukraine:
(Signed) Leonid D. KUCHMA
For the S.C.P. Foundation:
(Signed) Mansfield HART

RESTRICTED MERCURY

RESTRICTED MERCURY

INCIDENT REPORT
WT-0323

2014/03/18
LOCATION: SITE-991 (SIMFEROPOL, CRIMEA)
ANOMALIES INVOLVED:
- SCP-████ [SAFE],
- SCP-████ [SAFE],
- SCP-████ [SAFE],
- SCP-████ [EUCLID],
- SCP-████ [SAFE],
- ████████ (████████████ █████ ██████████, █████),
- Various uncatalogued acquisitions.

On Thurs. 18 March, unidentified forces approached the Ukrainian Army 13th Photogrammatry Center and SITE-991 at approx 15:00 local time in two (2) unmarked URAL-4320 trucks flying Russian Federation flags. Fifteen (15) masked gunmen disembarked from the vehicles and approached the gate to the facility, demanding entrance. Ukrainian servicemen denied the gunmen entrance to the compound and demanded identification.
The gunmen identified themselves as self-defense forces of the Republic of Crimea and demanded full surrender of the base and the persons therein. The Ukrainian servicemen again declined to admit the individuals into the compound; both parties, respectively, assumed threatening postures.
███████, ██████, self-defense militiaman, began scaling the perimeter fence. Ukrainian servicemen stated and re-iterated that trespassers on military premises would be shot. ███████ continued to scale the fence. █████, ████████, stationed on a watchtower overlooking the fence, opened fire with an automatic rifle, to fatal injury. █████ was then shot (also fatally).
Both parties began to allege the responsibility of the other for the incident. Ukrainian servicemen — while monitoring the militiamen closely — withdrew, barricading themselves within the installation. The militiamen scaled the fence, opened the gate, and took up firing positions in the construction site opposite the installation.
AGENTS ██████, ███, & ████████, having heard gunfire, proceeded to contact FOUNDATION OPERATIONAL CONTROL EASTERN EUROPE (FOCEE) via phone-line, and, under FOCEE recommendation, quit SITE-991 and began negotiations with the militiamen. Identifying themselves as Ukrainian servicemen (in accordance with Foundation security protocol), the respective agents surrendered their sidearms and granted the militamen access to SITE-991. The agents stressed de-escalation.
[CONFIDENTIAL LEVEL 5]
An unmarked jeep of the UAZ-469 type arrived on site approx. 16:30 local time; four (4) individuals in Berkut special police uniform, wielding AS Val assault-rifles and one (1) VSS Vintorez sniper-rifle, disembarked from the vehicle. These individuals identified themselves to AGENT ████████ as FSB DIVISION P, SPECIAL RECOVERY TEAM █. The team began removing computer hard drives and external harddrives, acquisition containment cells, ███ ██████████ ███████████ ████ █. █ ██████ ███████████ █████ █████████ ██ ██████████.
[CONFIDENTIAL LEVEL 5]
AGENTS ██████, ███, & ████████ were detained, restrained and blindfolded, forced into the vehicle, and transported approx. ██ miles from SITE-991, where they were transferred to a helicopter, in which they were appropriated to ███████████, and subjected to an expanded interrogation.
A FOCEE containment group arrived on-site at approx. 17:45 local time, and began a classification operation. ███████████ ███ █████████. ███ ███████ ████ ████████ ████████ ███████ ███████ ████████. The Ukrainian servicemen - barricaded in the second story of the nautical building - surrendered following the application of aural memetics. Amnestics were distributed on-site.
[CONFIDENTIAL LEVEL 5]
AGENTS ██████, ███, & ████████ were returned to the Foundation on 2014/03/26, released from DIVISION P custody at approx 13:00 local time. All three agents have received two months of paid leave and $██,████ USD as compensation. The FSB has declined to return anomalies ████, ████, ████, ████, ████, or ████, however, it has issued a formal apology.

Signed, Agents ██████, ███, & ████████
██████
███
████████
Signed, Director ████████
████████

RESTRICTED MERCURY


In a dark room a bank of monitor screens illuminated a pale face. The rusted brown glow of the video feeds gave Roger Little more color than the sun had cared to give him in the past few months. Half a kilometer north and two hundred meters down, an automated surveillance drone slowly made its way through a series of corroded metal hallways.
It was oddly silent, beyond the whine of computers and the whir of fans. Roger fiddled with his volume before checking the system audio. Nothing but the noises of the drone itself. No groaning, no creaking, no screaming. Just the soft click clack of the drone.
Roger checked the timing. The drone should have reached it by now. He squinted into the glare and overrode the drone. Nothing but flakes of rusted metal scattered across a floor of rusted metal, fallen from the walls and ceiling of rusted metal.
After several minutes of searching, Roger rubbed his temples. He drummed his fingers on his little metal desk and took a few deep breaths. He reached over and picked up the bulky plastic phone sitting on the edge of his work space. He dialed the number and only had to wait a few seconds before it was answered.
"Sir? It's Roger Little, from Surveillance. We may have a problem."

In the cold reaches of space, a satellite continued to do what it had done for over a decade. It hung in the weaker clutches of the Earth's gravity and watched a man wander about.
The man it was watching, however, was doing something a ways away from his status quo. He was running. Through the sweltering heat of the American Southwest in the middle of its summer, over the scorched earth, under a blazing sun, Mister Lost ran.
In hot pursuit was a man with fiery red hair. His black jacket left unbuttoned, it snapped behind him like shadows cast by a fire, the red trimming a much duller affair than his hair. He was gaining on Lost, who continued to make the mistake of looking over his shoulder. Each glance seemed to give the red-haired man more speed.
The eventual collision left Lost sprawled on the ground for a moment before he tried crawling away. The second man was up in a near instant. He brushed himself off and waited a moment before continuing his pursuit. He walked just behind Lost for a time, until he tried to get up. The pursuer kicked his target back onto the ground. This repeated itself for some time, until the red-haired main simply grabbed the man in the green jacket and dragged him in the opposite direction.
They eventually came upon a third man, who had been sitting on a rock outcropping. Blood and rust clung to every inch of his body. With what seemed to be considerable effort, the man stood. He took two steps before falling.
The red man grabbed the rusted man by the shirt and hauled him up onto his shoulder in a way that was quick but not unkind. All the while Mister Lost remained gripped in his opposite hand. After what looked like a satisfied sigh, the red man walked east.

An O5 rolled an unlit cigar back and forth over the sleek top of his desk. In front of him, the video feed on his monitor ended. Beyond that, his secretary stood at attention.
The secretary took a brief glance at his clipboard. "As you can see, sir, the unknown humanoid has captured both 2933 and 920. Further surveillance from multiple sources show it is now heading for one of our facilities."
The Overseer idly flicked the cigar, sending it spinning. "Given the context, I'm guessing it can be safely assumed who the entity is?"
"It's attacked two of the three Little Mister anomalies we don't have properly contained and now seems to be heading for the Site where we contain the other seventeen. Combined with its general appearance, yes. The list's designation number fourteen, Mr. Redd."
"Lock the Site down. We don't know what Redd is capable of. Considering it was able to escape 2933-1 and has been able to transport 920 for over a hundred miles without stopping, it's not something we want to discover first hand in the midst of an active facility."
The secretary nodded and departed for his own desk. Left alone, the Overseer plucked the cigar up and spun it between his fingers. He replayed the submitted videos and quietly thought to himself.
Eventually his secretary returned, and after a brief wait hustled back out with a freshly stamped order. Alone again, O5-4 slid the silver lighter off his desk and thumbed it several times before it sparked.

A group of people sat in a room full of monitors. Not quite like the one previously described, which was merely a one man obligation simply for the principle of the thing. As the door so boldly claimed, reading Site-██1 Security, this was a security station for a Foundation site, full of attentive individuals, with live feeds covering nearly every hallway and the ability to stream feeds from various containment cells if forwarded from the cell's own containment team.
One attentive individual sat up in her chair, more so than her already perfect posture had allowed. She began squinting at one of the monitors showing a feed of a camera deep within the facility, well away from any of the entrances.
Within the frame was a trio of men. One was dressed in a black and red jacket, one in a coat of metal, and one in a green hoodie. The first was carrying the second and dragging the third, the former of which was groaning and screeching like rusted clockwork and the latter was attempting to crawl away despite appearing to be unconscious.
She wondered how they arrived in the site despite it being locked down, when no one else had made any sort of comment. The worker flagged down her superior as quick as she could and explained what she had seen. But when she pointed to the group of monitors of the area the men had just been spotted in, they were nowhere to be seen. Now one of her coworkers, who had been monitoring an entirely different Wing, was reporting about them.
By the time attention arrived on the monitor in question the men were nowhere to be seen, and further examination showed they had disappeared from surveillance entirely.

O5-4 snubbed out his cheap cigar in one hand and thumbed one of the buttons on his monitor with the other. A round woman with sharp eyes snapped into view.
After a smokey exhale the O5 sat up and meshed his fingers together, if only for himself. His outgoing calls only showed a generic silhouette. "Dziekan. I hope all is well."
The Site Director fidgeted. To her credit, it was only slightly. "Not as such, sir. Redd has somehow breached the site with both Lost and Scary. More than that, he broadcasted a video message from somewhere in the facility. And he's made demands."
The weight of the silence from her superior stayed Dziekan. After several seconds O5-4 took a slow breath and said, "Somewhere in the facility?"
"Well. Sir. I don't recognize the area. It appeared to be a medical bay, but it definitely isn't any I'm aware of. With him was a little girl with a swollen stomach. He called her Katherine but we don't have any subjects on file with that name."
The name pressed down on the Overseer's chest. He took slow, deep breaths in an effort to calm himself but every inhale became more and more difficult. On autopilot, his hands opened his cigar case. The lighter sparked on the first flick and he took a deep drag. On exhale he realized what he was doing, but decided he may as well enjoy it while he could. How in the world could Redd have known about 231—
"O5-4? Are you still there?"
He shifted out of his daze, if only slightly. "Dziekan. Right. Yes. What were his demands?"
"For you to personally come in to see him, or he would kill the girl."
The next pull turned half the cigar to ash. "And?"
"Nothing else. Just for you to see him in person."
O5-4 watched his hand shake, smoke from the cigar zigzagging. "What did you tell him?"
"That I would notify you."
"You didn't say anything about that being against protocol, it being unlikely of happening, anything like that?"
"Seemed unwise to do so, given the context."
He finished his cigar. "If we're both alive tomorrow, remind me to give you a pay raise."
"Sir?"
He terminated the connection.

One door creaked open only to reveal another. O5-4 stepped through and stared down at the man leaning against the wall, an IV sticking into his arm. Mister Scary looked at him and smiled. The contraction chipped away some rust and blood flowed from the edges of his mouth. Neither said anything as the Overseer stepped past the Little Mister, glanced at the bag of morphine, and went through the second door, this one rusted open.
He considered breaking into a run down the hallway and settled on a stiff jog. Some of the tiles cracked under his feet and when he arrived at the double doors they were open, the joints rusting them in place. "I: 1-7 Os: Ker" was all that was visible of the plaque beside the doors.
Rust began to cling to some of the machinery, but the video feed of SCP-231-7's room was still functioning. Overseer Four steeled himself before looking.
A little girl lay in a hospital bed, her pregnant belly covered by her surgical gown. She seemed quite calm given the circumstances, but given her general situation there likely wasn't much that would upset her anymore.
Next to her bed was a man in a red vest, his jacket draped over the back of his seat. In one hand he held the ankle of a rusting man who was attempting to crawl away, and in the other he held a children's book.
The only sounds in the room were Lost groaning as his body rusted as he scrabbled against the decaying tiles and Redd reading in a warm voice.
O5-4 found the intercom and pressed the button. Katherine winced at the squealing as the system turned on and Redd cocked his head at the noise.
"Alright, Mister Redd. I'm here."
Redd released Lost and slowly turned in his seat to reach into his jacket pocket, removing a piece of paper. He marked his place in the story and shut it, setting the book on the bed. As Redd looked into the camera O5-4 saw flakes of brown and black on Redd's skin, red lightning sparking against it and revealing smooth skin.
Redd smiled. "Please, no need for the 'Mister' formality. We're all friends here. I'm Redd open parenthesis discontinued closed parenthesis. My friends just call me Redd. How are you, Four?"
Geniality was not what O5-4 was expecting. A few moments passed, filled only with the sound of Lost banging on the door, before Redd tilted his head and waved at the camera. O5-4 cleared his throat and said, "I've been better, Redd. You've been causing a lot of problems lately. Now what is it you want?"
Redd shrugged theatrically, splaying his palms. "Sorry about that. Though I do believe I was clear with my video earlier. I'd like to see you, face to face. No cameras, no PA systems. No tricks, no body doubles."
Was that a knife in Redd's hand? No, nothing. A trick of the light, a video oddity.
"Before that, I have one question. How did you get here?"
"Walked."
"The site has been on lockdown and you were able to avoid surveillance for most of your trek despite us having a satellite meant to track Mister Lost. And you somehow not only knew of this Wing, but how to access it."
"Like I said, I walked. As for why I knew, call it insider information. Now, please do get in here."
Again, a glimpse of black in his palm. A jagged shadow that played hell with the lighting of the room.
With great trepidation O5-4 unlocked the blast door and dodged Lost as he darted past. After watching the Little Mister run down the hall, the Overseer stepped into the room. It smelled of disinfectant and lilac, thanks to the small aromatizer next to the bed. He felt his heart hammer away at his throat as he looked to Redd, and clench slightly when the child gave him a little wave.
Redd gestured to the armchair on the opposite side of the bed. Once they were both seated Redd cupped his hands together and sighed.
"So, this is it," Redd said. "The finale. The brief period after a long sentence that drips with the taste of freedom. How long have you been doing this job?"
The Overseer was silent.
Redd smiled. Four would have sworn the overhead lights took on a slightly bloody hue.
"I," Redd finally said, "have been a Little Mister for… what is it, almost twenty years? Something like that. It's been difficult, let me tell you."
Redd looked down at the dagger in his hand, which was now all too real. With something akin to reverence he lifted it up and dragged the shadow across his own throat, cutting so deep his exposed trachea whistled softly. Red ran down his shirt. But it clung at odd places, depicting runes that sat at the edge of the Overseer's memory. Lightning lanced out and into the damage, the blood draining as red sparks healed the wound.
The Little Mister took another breath, "And there's no getting away from it. It won't let me go. As long as this stupid dirt ball keeps spinning, I'm going to be here. Unchanging. Undying. Unable to feel much beyond blinding rage."
He smiled again. "But what if I stopped the spinning? What if I could stop it all? What if I could stop hurting? I'd have to try, right?"
"If that's your intention, why bring me here? Why drag the other two around?"

"I guess I needed some kind of... closure," Redd said, his eyes distant.

"I guess I needed some kind of... closure," Redd said, his eyes distant.

I walked. I don't know how long, but I did. I know that much. I somehow ended up at the Wonderworks, the place that had eluded me for so bloody long. And it was running. No old man, but the place was bustling all the same. It was the gods damned child! The oh, so lovely Isabel! But what could I do to her? She was in the same sort as me, in a way. She asked me why you pricks hadn't collected me yet. I didn't really have an answer, but I figured, why not? Not like I had anything else to do. Suicide wasn't the option, as you can plainly fucking see!
But as I got closer, I got this feeling. This itching, burning sensation digging into my soul— if I even have one anymore. There was a thing, locked deep in the hole my brothers were buried. It spoke to me in ways I'll never be able to convey to you. Just. Fuck. It felt good. And I knew. I knew! I always thought I was just subject to anger issues, but all along I was a subject to the King!
Did you know gods can't die? They just… fade, waiting for their time to come again. But they still leave corpses. Something to jam a spigot into and tap into whatever power might be left lying around. The old man must have gotten desperate. Brass wasn't enough, even as big as the corpse he got pulled from is. A Broken universe still yields a Broken power, and a sliver of a fragment isn't worth much of anything. So he tried something a bit more intact, and…
...
What was I talking about? …Wait. Wait, no…
...
I used to say I have these… lucid moments. It's like— Do you wear glasses? You look the type. That brief time when you put them on, when your eyes see both through and around the lens. And everything just seems to warp around you as the glass rushes forward, the world shifts as the filter expands. You wear them long enough and you stop seeing the frames in your vision, don't feel the arms on your ears anymore.
...
I can't tell if my humanity is the prescription or the astigmatism anymore.
And I don't care. I'm so, so sick of it all. My eyes are strained to the point of bleeding and I can't close them. But at least that means I get to watch the end.

Redd eventually stirred from his trance. "Here, I want you to have this." He removed the bookmark from its spot and unfolded it before handing it over.
O5-4 stared at the list. One line in particular drew his eye.

14. Mr. Redd (discontinued) ✔

The man stood there for a moment, eyes unfocused. Somewhere in his mind the twentieth slot was filled. He leaned to the right, his hand out as if ready for a cane to take the weight. After a moment he caught his balance and examined his right hand, then the left, flexing and clenching them. He straightened back up and examined the room.
The former body of O5-4 took a breath.
Mister Collector let it out.
Collector reached into his pocket and pulled out a crisp piece of paper, uncrumpled despite its confines.
He let out a small chuckle. The paper between his thumb and middle finger, he snapped, and a bubble formed around the parchment. It floated just above his palm, bounced when he tapped it. He gave the top of the bubble a light pat and it collapsed into itself, away for him to take out later.
"How you feeling?" Redd asked from his seat.
"Better than I have in years," Collector responded. When he spoke, Redd sat up. Squinted. "And yourself?"
"You—!" Redd flew forward, knife in hand.
Collector slapped it away into a bubble, which soared just out of Redd's flailing grasp. Redd drew another from his sleeve and threw it, only for it to be caught in another bubble. Red in the face, Redd swung a fist while simply producing a dagger from his palm. Collector caught the punch and a silky bubble wrapped itself around Redd's hand. He pulled and yanked and was only able to free himself when he released his grip on the third shadow knife.
"How?!" Redd demanded. "You should be dead! The girl said you were dead!"
"I likely am. The me you are speaking to is merely a copy, made prior to Mister Forgetful erasing 'me' from my old body. Whatever was left in the body of Isiah Crawford after that was Doctor Wondertainment, though with a bit too much Factory mixed in for my taste. I suppose I remember all that because Forgetful couldn't get to me as I was merely in potentia. You remember Mister Mad?"
"He was a fucking— were we all just tests? A fucking training ground?"
"Not all of you, no." Mister Collector, née Doctor Wondertainment smiled. It lacked its old rainbow glow but it shined all the same. "Forgetful and Stripes to cover my tracks, the latter's brother to get you all here…" The smile faded. "…Scary. Ahem. Truth be told, this whole Collector concept was done fairly late into the project's development. I mostly wanted to see how things would turn out. How is Isabel doing?"
Redd glowered. "So then why was I made?"
The old man narrowed the eyes that weren't really his. "Hmm. You were a gamble, I suppose. Of course, I made a grave error— as they say, always bet on black."
Redd grabbed Collector by the collar. "Do you think this is a fucking joke? That I am somehow funny?"
"Not as such. My apologies, I was trying to lighten the mood. What would you like me to say? That you were a defect? That I condensed a power that was much more destructive than I could have imagined and pumped it into some young man's veins? I tried to change you, but you just wouldn't take much. So Redd you became."
Redd released his grip, his face expressionless. "So I'm a mistake."
Collector straightened his tie. "I would more say… an unfortunate surprise. But who doesn't like surprises?"
"Ha…" Redd reeled back, smiling. It took another few seconds for his face to move again. "I'll show you a surprise."
"And what's that?"
The grin in Redd's mouth was almost as sharp as the knives in Collector's bubbles. "That would be telling, dear father. Can't spoil the surprise."
Redd sidled next to the child's bed and smiled down at her. Katherine smiled back up at him, her gaze occasionally edging toward the other Mister. Redd sat down, the impact bouncing the book up and off of the bed. A chuckle left him as he bent over to get it.
Redd set the book down in the center of the bed. He traced out a curved knife on the cover. A spark of red followed his fingertip, outlining the weapon. Once completed the red flickered and was filled with black. Redd slipped the knife off the book as one would a playing card and held it for Collector to see. When Redd turned it so that the blade faced Collector, it appeared to merely be a wispy black line flickering in the light.
"Are you ready?" Redd asked Katherine in a soft voice.
The child took a few breaths. "Are you sure you can? I don't want Him getting hurt."
Redd twirled the knife in one hand and brushed back her hair with the other. "These people may have locked him away, but I just so happen to have the key."
With trembling fingers she lifted up her gown to expose her belly. Brands marked the swollen skin, dull and dark. They crackled like coal when Redd touched them. Katherine laid flat and squeezed her eyes shut.
The twisted scalpel slipped into her, the blade so fine she didn't wince. But as Redd ran the knife across her, she began to scream. The runes on her skin sizzled as Redd cut through them, vapor rising into the air. Within the girl, red and purple pulsed and writhed, her womb mangled and distended. It squished and squelched as her yelling became racking sobs.
All the while, Collector stood impassively at the foot of the bed. He had seen as bad, caused worse, but a twinge of guilt struck him as he thought of Sweetie. Hopefully she would at least speak to him when he found her. Collector stirred from his thoughts when Redd cleared his throat, knife hanging over the mess.
"Don't lose focus, old man. You're about to witness the birth of a new era. Or, at least, the death of this one."
The knife dropped.
Rather than cut or tear into the tissue, the dagger simply sank into it. Black into a mottled red. But as it was swallowed, a pinprick of bright red showed itself. There was a moment of stillness, even within the girl, as the shadows cast across her intestines swirled to the red.
The room was suddenly all too full. The smell of iron was nearly palpable, a loud ripping sound the only thing accompanying Katherine's now-resumed screams. Hardened flesh that matched the color of a dying sun dripped with blood and placenta. It pressed everywhere within the room, on the walls, under the bed, even within the inhabitants. The ceiling began to crack, and then the tearing sound intensified enough to drown out the sobs.
The ceiling exploded. The earth and concrete above it was obliterated as the thing rose, level after level was leveled by the growing expanse. It grew as it rose, each rising floor destroyed in a greater capacity. Eventually Site-██ was exposed to the open air, where dark clouds were beat about by a pair of reverse wings. Eleven mouths creaked open to take their first breaths.
Foundation personnel stared up in slack-jaw awe. At a distance, civilians who could spot at least the crown of horns began to panic. Down in the medical room, the trio remained. A thin umbilical cord connecting Katherine to her son. Redd cackled and pointed the monstrosity out to the spent child. Collector tapped the side of his head and a bubble formed around it.
The Seventh Son spoke. Clouds broke and the sky cracked under the weight of his words. The air itself tasted of blood. All those within the range of His mighty voice felt crimson run out their ears, with the exception of a single man standing in the center of it all. His bubble vibrated rainbows against the onslaught, but held.
"Do you see?!" Redd yelled, none hearing him over the din. He touched the blood coming from his ear and showed Collector. "It's over! I can finally be over!"
Once the bubble stopped shaking, Collector popped it. The world was silent, waiting for the Son's next words. He took the umbilical cord in his hand and proffered it to Redd. A crack of a smile broke Redd's face. From nowhere he produced another dagger and with no amount of ceremony separated mother and child.
Knowing this, the Seventh Son drew another breath. When He spoke again, His words fell on deaf ears. The air around him shimmered slightly, reflecting a rainbow in places.
Collector lowered his hand from where he had touched the Scarlet King's spawn. Something stuck to his hand, which he wiped off on the bed sheet. He cleared his throat and adjusted his tie again.
After a moment he turned to Redd, a small smile on his lips. "I'm so sorry, I'm afraid I couldn't hear you over all the noise. What were you saying?"
Redd said nothing. He did nothing, for a short time. Then his eye twitched. He looked at the shimmer of the bubble around the Seventh Son, at the stain on the bed sheet. Bony palms dug into his eyes as he tried to rub whatever nonsense was clouding his vision. When he looked again, the scene was the same.
"…No," Redd finally said, a full sword in his hand. He slashed at the bubble, the blade digging into the film. Then it flew out of his hand as the bubble pushed back. "No."
Collector watched Redd attack the bubble over and over again with a variety of shadow weapons. After a dozen or so weapons were embedded in the wall behind him, Redd slashed at his own hands and thrust the scarlet lightning into the bubble. It did nothing but catch the light.
"No!" Redd repeated, turning on Collector. "No."
"Sorry, is this distracting you?" Collector said. He raised a palm and snatched away the Seventh Son, now the size of a newt contained within the ball in the Little Mister's hand. "I'll put it away."
Redd watched his savior vanish with a whimsical pop! Mouth agape, he turned to his Queen. She couldn't look back, her eyes glazed over. Her breaths came in short, ragged bursts. Redd ground his teeth together and turned back to Collector.
With a mouth full of blood and darkness, Redd yelled, "No!"
He stumbled forward, knife in hand without the usual motion. It buried itself in Collector's chest.
"No!" Redd screamed, spraying blood in Collector's face. He pulled the knife out of his brother/father and continued stabbing him. "No. No! NO!"
Blood flew from the knife with each stab. Droplets froze in midair, catching other sprays and sloshing together into hovering bubbles of blood. Color drained from Collector's face as Redd's gained more and more.
"No…" Redd whispered, losing breath. His arm fell, opening a large gash across Collector's stomach. The knife fell and disintegrated, merging with the shadow cast by the last blood orb. A tear droplet met it. "No…"
Collector/Isiah hugged his brother/son. Redd sobbed against the offered shoulder. When the cries weakened in strength, Collector led Redd back to his seat. Redd fell into it and wrapped himself in his jacket. With a flick of his wrist Collector brought the crimson orbs into himself. By the time he finished collecting what shadow weapons remained he regained his color, though he moved slowly. He went about pop!ing the armaments away save for one. He took it out of its bubble and sat on the arm of the chair, between Redd and Katherine.
"I can't say this is how I envisioned the family reunion," Collector mused. "But I think I can afford you at least one gift."
Redd almost laughed. "What could you possibly give me?"
"Less give." Collector tapped Redd's forehead. "More take."
Redd blinked. He stared at the swirling hate bubbled in front of him. He winced when it vanished with a light tap from Collector. Emptiness filled him. Wonderful, calming emptiness. Tranquil, simple serenity.
Redd felt where Collector had prodded him. "It… it's gone?"
"Simply somewhere else."
Redd nearly sprang from his chair. "The girl! You could… take whatever they did to her out? Make her right?"
"I don't believe they made her wrong," Collector said, turning his gaze to Katherine. "If the Scarlet King could enter this world without humanity's help, he would have done it already. She chose this life for him. There is nothing for me to take from her, except…"
The black dagger seemed to try to catch the light in his hand.
"At least let me do it," Redd urged.
"I didn't wash your hands of blood just for you to dirty them again, Redd," Collector replied. "What's a few more drops on mine?"
He was silent for a moment, and then Redd said, "I don't think I really want that name anymore."
"Oh?"
He closed his eyes. The roiling red sea of his mind was now a calm blue. "I'm thinking Bluee."
"Blue?"
"With two E's."
Collector wheezed a laugh. "So be it. Excuse me one moment, Bluee."
It was over quick. Bluee found it hard to look at her, so he covered her up.
"So… what now?" Bluee asked.
"Now you enter one of the Foundation's little boxes, like your siblings," Collector said.
"What? That's it?" Bluee stood. "No, that isn't fair, it can't just end like-"
Collector held up a hand, and Bluee went silent. Collector reached into his pocket slowly, like the old man he looked to be. "You may be free of the Scarlet King's branding, but not of Wondertainment's. I'm in the body of a Foundation Overseer now. We have to act our parts."
Collector finally retrieved the paper he had pulled from his pocket earlier. He offered it to Bluee, who took it gingerly.

Wow! You've found them all and became Mr. Collector!!
But the fun isn't over yet, because now a whole new set of Misters will soon be in development, brought to you by our own Ms. Heir!
00. Mr. Collector ✔
01. Mr. Chameleon ✔
02. Mr. Headless ✔
03. Mr. Laugh ✔
04. Mr. Forgetful ✔
05. Mr. Shapey ✔
06. Mr. Soap ✔
07. Mr. Hungry ✔
08. Mr. Brass ✔
09. Mr. Hot ✔
10. Ms. Sweetie ✔
11. Mr. Life and Mr. Death ✔
12. Mr. Fish ✔
13. Mr. Moon ✔
14. Mr. Redd (discontinued) ✔
15. Mr. Money ✔
16. Mr. Lost ✔
17. Mr. Lie ✔
18. Mr. Mad ✔
19. Mr. Scary ✔
20. Mr. Stripes ✔

Bluee made a double take.

But the fun isn't over yet, because now a whole new set of Misters will soon be in development, brought to you by our own Ms. Heir!

Bluee looked up.
Collector's smile had more strength than the rest of his body combined. "Because we're not done yet."

Footnotes
1. SCP-2148 had gotten curious again recently.


by qntm

Previously

Marion Wheeler is curled in the corner of Site 41's main freight elevator, descending, clutching a shiny red ray gun almost as long as she is tall. The gun has a two-tined prong instead of a barrel and its stock is a weirdly asymmetrical mass of pipework, more like a Swiss watch or a small intestinal tract than a weapon. The gun is SCP-7381, and it comes from a long-dead planet — not too distant a planet, when all's said and done — which conventional astronomy has yet to observe.
A tornado of violence and destruction is tearing through Site 41 and through the minds of everybody working at Site 41. Ceilings are being brought down, the site pharmacy is a sucking hole at the side of the building. The armoury is buried; that's why she had to go through Area 09 and is now toting anomalous weaponry instead. The Antimemetics Division operatives she meets in the corridors are all broken; some of them curled up and raving while their minds evaporate and they die one memory at a time, some infected with a collection of ideas which compel them to shout guttural phrases in strange languages, and to procure blades — never guns — and work on those demented victims, and each other, and themselves.
Wheeler doesn't recognise any of the people. Their faces are all wrong, torn up with hatred and misery and vindictive glee. She's been trying to avoid fighting, but she's had to kill one man in self-defence. Fired at his heart, SCP-7381 simply erased a half-metre-wide cylinder of matter, removing his upper torso and lower jaw. He fell to the ground in four pieces. SCP-7381's beam is invisible, silent and recoilless. It was like using a child's toy gun.
Wheeler is petrified, but more than that, angry. "This is too much," she says, out loud, willing her heart rate back under control. "I can't deal with this. I shouldn't have to deal with this. It's my fucking first day!"

*

But how much sense does that make? Wheeler studies her reflection in the dark glass of the elevator control panel, and she tours the interior of her own skull, examining her thought processes. There are hints there, which would be difficult to articulate to someone who didn't know her as well as she knows herself. She isn't thinking like a newbie. She's instinctively breaking the problem apart, the way an experienced Foundation operative should. Hell, a newbie wouldn't even know how to carry out a detailed psychological self-examination of this kind. A newbie wouldn't even think of it, a newbie would just suffocate.
"The first thing it did when it saw me," she explains to her reflection, "was eat everything I knew about the Division. And everything I knew about it. If I had a plan, it ate the plan. …But I'm still me. So I can come up with that plan again. It's already right in front of me, I just need to see it. If I were me, what would my plan have been?"
She scratches absently at her left wrist.
"Taking some hardcore mnestic drugs would have been a smart first step, I guess," she mutters. "Reinforcing my mind, so that it can't erase the rest of the steps. Damn." The nearest source of mnestic medicine is the site pharmacy, but it's already been destroyed, and in any case the elevator is headed down, away from it.
No. Stop. The pharmacy's been destroyed? How do I know that?
Well, because she was there. She remembers finding the pharmacist crushed to death beneath a fallen medical cabinet, her skull an unrecognisable splatter of scarlet. She remembers the floor being torn away beneath her feet, and only barely making it out of that portion of the building alive.
She remembers— a modular package coloured Safety Orange, with an enormous black Z on it. Her heart nearly stops at this. Oh, God. What did I do?
She remembers the dozens of warning signs covering the package; she remembers the three-factor authorisation procedure she had to follow to get into the sealed container where it was stored; she remembers the centimetre-thick book of medical advisory information, which she discarded; and, rolling her left sleeve back, she finds a fresh needle mark with a speck of blood, and remembers administering the injection.
This was my plan? This is what it takes to fight SCP-3125? I've killed myself—
Class-Z mnestics are the last word in biochemical memory fortification. Class-Z mnestics permanently destroy the subject's ability to forget. The result is perfect eidetic memory and perfect immunity to arbitrarily strong antimemetic interference.
The dose is taking effect now. Wheeler didn't read the book because she already knew every word of it. She knows everything that's about to happen to her. She can already feel her mind hardening, like steel, and the developing symptoms of extreme sensory overload.
She can see everything.
There are extra buttons on the elevator control panel, the lowest of which, the thirtieth floor below ground level, she's somehow already pushed. The walls of the elevator are covered with graffiti scrawled by the desperate and dying, people whose conceptual presence was eradicated from reality years earlier by the Alastair Grey antimemetic kill agent, reducing them to the level of ghosts. In one corner of the freight elevator there is even a half-corpse, unidentifiable, so many layers removed from reality that not even flies can smell it, its cells winking out of existence asymptotically over the course of years.
There is a fistful of tiny white worms exploring the floor of the elevator car, near where she's sitting. Revolted, Wheeler shuffles back from them, shaking one or two more of them out of her hair. The worms are among the most widespread and successful antimemetically cloaked organisms in the world. They are everywhere, in every biome, in every room.
She can hear a long, alarming drone noise, a continual roaring which has the texture of ambient noise and is continually getting louder. It's as if it's been there for her entire life, and it's only now that she's begun to hear it.
It's too much data. Too much sound, too much light. Having her eyes open is like jamming them full of needles. She clamps her hands over her ears and screws her eyes up. Even like this, she feels the vibration of the elevator's slow descent and the heat of the failed air conditioning and the movement of her clothes on her skin, and meanwhile her vision is flooding instead with what could be hallucinations. The human sensorium routinely generates huge amounts of data and the human brain is adapted to discard almost all of that data nearly immediately. Altering the brain's behaviour to retain that data is extremely dangerous even for very short time spans.
Wheeler takes one hand away from her ear for just long enough to punch the metal wall of the elevator car, bloodying two knuckles. The pain gives her a focal point, a memory which screams a little louder than the rest.
And she finds the plan. She doesn't remember it; she bootstraps it from first principles, in a handful of minutes, just like she's done a hundred times before.
"I know how to beat you," she says.
"No," SCP-3125 says to her. "You don't."

*

The elevator stops at the thirtieth floor below ground and its doors grind open. They wait, open, for a long time. Further up the elevator shaft there are the distant rumbles of more parts of Site 41 being reduced to crumbs.
Still crouched in the corner, Wheeler mutters, "SCP-3125 doesn't have a voice."
"Of course I do," it replies.
"SCP-3125 is a five-dimensional anomalous metastasized mass of bad memes and bad antimemes and everything in between, seeping through to our physical reality. It isn't coherent and it isn't intelligent. It can't communicate. This is an auditory hallucination."
SCP-3125 scoffs. "You know what I hate most about you, Marion? You're consistently, eternally wrong… and yet you're still alive. All those lost battles, every year of that entire lost war, but somehow you always cobble together enough dumb luck to walk away unscathed. The eternal sole survivor. You don't deserve that kind of luck. Nobody does."
While it's talking, Wheeler leans hard on the ray gun to get to her feet. She lodges one shoulder against the wall of the elevator car, still with her eyes closed. She braces herself, and opens her eyes. The corridor ahead is empty. There's an airlock at the far end, this one large enough to drive a truck through, built from ultra-toughened white metal alloy in Bart Hughes's established style. There's a panel beside the airlock. She closes her eyes again and hobbles forward, using the ray gun as a crutch, stretching one hand out ahead of her as guidance.
"Someone has to be last," she says, gritting her teeth. "Someone has to be the best."
"Your team is dead," SCP-3125 says. "Their minds have been pulled out, like eyeballs. They're hollow people, with holes in space where their brains were. The war is over! Finally! It's just you, Marion, a division of one! Dying from mnestic overdose, two hundred metres underground, cared for by no one, known to exist to no one, up against an immortal, unkillable idea."
Wheeler reaches the airlock and fumbles blindly with the panel until she finds the slot for her keycard. For a few seconds it seems as if nothing is happening, then a yellow light flashes, the enormous mechanical interlocks unlatch and the door cycles open with all the fuss of a flower's petals unfurling. Noise, Hughes always held, is a symptom of imperfect engineering.
Behind her, she hears the freight elevator close up and return to ground level, and she knows that someone has summoned it, intending to pursue her.
"Ideas can be killed," she says, stepping into the airlock.
"How?"
"With better ideas."
As the airlock cycles closed, so does the hermetic seal. SCP-3125 is shut out.

*

If something can cross over from conceptual space into reality, taking physical form, then something can cross in the opposite direction. It must be possible to take a physical entity, mechanically extract the idea which it embodies, amplify that idea and broadcast it up into conceptual space. A bigger idea. A better idea, one designed specifically to fight SCP-3125.
An ideal. A movement. A hero.
The machine Wheeler needs to build is the size of an Olympic stadium, and she doesn't have a fraction of the heavy memetic engineering experience to do it, let alone the material resources or the time. But she knows — someone taught her, she doesn't remember who — that an Antimemetics Division operative is as good on their first day as they're ever likely to be. And the same must be true of the Division as a whole.
She tells herself: We won this war on the day it began. When we encountered SCP-3125 for the first time, we built this bunker. Bart Hughes faked his death and sequestered himself here so he could work uninterrupted, while the rest of the Division held on for as long as humanly possible, buying time for this moment. I know this is what I did, because it's what I would have done.
I'm the final component. He's waiting for me.

*

The space beyond the airlock is gigantic, structured and lit like an aircraft hangar and filled with hot, stale, dry air. Wheeler, still mostly blind, stumbles forward across an expanse of more than a hectare of flat, dusty epoxy flooring. "Hughes!" she shouts into the void. "It's time!" Nothing comes back but the echo.
She glances up for a second. The space is empty. The castle-sized memetic amplification/broadcasting unit which Bart Hughes was meant to be building is absolutely absent. Hughes himself is absent.
Maybe the entire machine is antimemetically cloaked? she wonders, momentarily. It would be a smart way to conceal the operation even from the rest of the Foundation. But her brain is curdling in the strongest mnestic drugs ever manufactured. There's genuinely nothing here.
Almost nothing. At the centre of the space there's a small outpost, a group of trestle tables with tools and toolboxes scattered about the place. Parked behind it is an unmarked military truck with flat tyres. On the back of the truck is a squat, squarish machine the size of a shipping container, with unshielded wiring and exposed pipework, and a long cable leading to a heavy-duty control panel on the floor. To the untrained eye, it is not at all clear what the machine is designed to do.
It's the antimemetic equivalent to a hydrogen bomb; the Division's answer to a site nuclear warhead. Activated, it would contaminate Site 41 and everything and everyone on it with antimemetic radiation. There would be no Site 41 and no Division afterwards; nothing any of the escaping, infectious staff did could have any effect on the real world.
It's the wrong machine.
It can't destroy or contain SCP-3125, or even injure it. All it can do is sterilise today's outbreak. The other symptoms will persist. Fifty or ten or five years from now, or maybe one year or maybe tomorrow, SCP-3125 will return, bringing with it its MK-class end-of-world scenario. Human civilisation will be entirely eradicated as an abstract concept, and be replaced with something unimaginably worse. There will be no one to fight it.
Wheeler leans there on the ray gun for a long moment. The pressure of information in her mind, continually increasing, reaches a point where she can't take it any more, and she starts to break. The Class-Z has been in her system for long enough now that she knows for a fact she has irreversible brain damage. There is no antidote. She'll be lucid for another hour, then spend the remaining two or three hours of her life vegetative.
That's right, she thinks. It's almost a relief. This is good. This is right.
I've survived too long. I forgot what universe this was. For a while there, I thought, maybe… this was the universe where we win sometimes.
The agony in her head is like an ice axe now. She drops the ray gun with a clatter, sinks to her knees, lies down and waits for either death or a better idea.

*

A being superficially resembling Paul Kim arrives at the outer airlock door. It examines the airlock uncomprehendingly for a few moments, then finds the keycard slot. It hunts methodically through Kim's pockets, then remembers the keycard around its neck. The airlock cycles once more and not-Kim goes through. Behind it, the freight elevator is returning to ground level a third time, to fetch the rest.
In the next room, the being which is not Paul Kim finds Wheeler, unconscious, with the ray gun dropped beside her. There is also a military truck, which it disregards.
Not-Kim lets its keycard fall from its fingers and scoops up the ray gun. For a moment it contemplates the unconscious Wheeler, then examines the gun itself, remembering how it works. It turns back to face the airlock and fires, punching fat cylindrical holes in the white metal of the inner door until it's gone, then the outer door too, breaching the hermetic seal. A faint smile returns to not-Kim's face as SCP-3125 and its familiar, comforting signals flood into the bunker.
A dozen more non-people are arriving by freight elevator, former Antimemetics Division bodies. "I've found her," not-Kim calls out to them. It drops the ray gun where it's standing, as if it simply forgot that it had been carrying anything, and pulls out its knife again. It holds the knife between two fingers, in a casual, offhand sort of way, as if it were a pencil or screwdriver.
The infected non-people gather with not-Kim around Wheeler, looking down at her with alien expressions of disgust, or pity, or malice.
"Why isn't she opening up properly?" someone asks. "She can't meet them unless she wants the signals."
"Start with her eyes," says someone else. "It'll make the rest of her easier to correct."
Not-Kim leans down to start work, then hesitates, its knife a few centimetres from Wheeler's eye. She's whispering something, so quietly that only it can hear her clearly.
"None of this happened, Paul," she says. "You and I never existed. There is no Antimemetics Division."
There's a sharp click as the bomb finishes its powering-up sequence. Nobody in the room can hear this but Wheeler. Nobody in the room can perceive the bomb but Wheeler. All they can see is an empty truck.
The world goes black.

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