The alarms had been going on for so long that his ears rang in between each beat of the klaxons' harsh, rising pitched wail. Every time he scanned a new hallway, his eyes picked out lurking shapes in the dim half-light, dispelled every time when his jittering hand pointed the flashlight at it, its rubber grip slick with sweat in his grip. In his time in this place, Site-17 had only experienced two alarms like this one. One was a fire, quickly extinguished. The other was something the guards and the researchers would refuse to discuss with him. Also quickly extinguished.
If the clocks in the various hallways were to be believed, this alarm had been going for at least four hours, or at least four hours after the door to his cell had been opened. Why it had been opened, when he knew there were at least three redundant failsafe systems supposed to prevent that outcome, he could not say.
The halls were dim, the site's power systems rerouted to what a planner somewhere must have deemed to be more important functions than brightly illuminating the sterile white walls and tile floors. To his eyes, the walls seemed to glow in the dim light, the spotlessly clean tiles each a twilight reflection on the ground. It made him feel as though he were walking through a dream, an entirely unwelcome reminder of some of his more distressing travels.
There had been screams, early on. He had heard them, even before his cell door was open. But yet there were no bodies. No blood, no scattered belongings, no damage to any equipment or any of the facilities. Somehow that was worse. The only noise now as he crept through the abandoned middle levels was the klaxons, and the faint echo of earlier screaming just behind the ringing in his ears. His heart pounded, so much that there were times he thought he was going to faint. The only thing keeping him moving was the thought of being found by whatever had caused this, and having nowhere to run inside of his standard humanoid containment cell.
His overriding instinct was to somehow get outside and as far away from Site-17 as possible. There was no telling the next time he would be snatched up by whatever force determined these things and sent god knows where; he had no intention of being randomly put back into a breached facility, back into the middle of whatever was going on here. He crept as quickly as he could around the next corner, hoping that a bank of elevators or a stairwell was at the end of the next turn.
Down the hallway, more empty rooms. More noise, more half-darkness. Utility closets, power stations, a janitorial supply room, all open and unattended. The hum of a still-glowing panel of instruments pulsed behind him as he continued. A red tile square on the ground in front of him caught his attention, the first he'd seen since the one directly in front of the entry to his cell. Another skip. The sign at the door indicated "SCP-085." He had heard about Cassy from the researchers. Curiosity welled up in the midst of his terror, and he carefully made his way through the open door.
In front of him was a stainless steel lectern, angled as though he were approaching it in order to give a speech to the blank white wall directly in front of him. The usual coterie of chairs and recording instruments lined the walls to the sides. A white drawing pad sat on top of the lectern, a cheap black ballpoint pen resting next to it. He approached.
In the dim emergency lighting, he saw her. A slim, long-haired young woman, drawn with clean, black strokes on the white paper, pacing frantically across the page. She was drawn in body armor, looking like the security personnel that he would see sometimes rushing through the site. At his approach, she stopped suddenly, a mixture of relief and fear playing across her elegantly drawn face. Despite the situation, he noted that her movements flowed elegantly as the lines that composed her shifted and uncoiled, nothing at all like the living animation that he had envisioned. She pointed desperately at the pen next to the pad, mouthing silently frantic words.
He picked up the pen and started to scribble in the corner of the sheet, his hurried handwriting a tangled mess compared to her precisely delineated form.
What the hell is going on?
Cassy looked up at the corner of the page, then pulled a notepad of her own out of one of the pockets of her BDUs. She hastily wrote, then held out the pad towards him. He squinted and adjusted his glasses, struggling to make out the tiny lettering.
You tell me.
Of course. They didn't tell the skips anything. Why should she be any different? He scrawled again in the corner of the page.
Look, I'm SCP-507. He paused a moment. Of course she knew that. It was printed several times across the front of his orange jumpsuit. I have no idea what's happening, but I'm getting out of here. Something is wrong. Do you want to come with me?
She looked back up at the corner, then immediately nodded her head affirmatively. She wrote a quick note on her pad.
Find Service Elevator B54!
He nodded, then gingerly picked up the drawing pad and the pen. As he looked back up, a figure was before him. A person, impossibly pitch black, hovered in the air before him, thrown into stark relief against the white wall, as though he were a man-shaped hole. At first he appeared to be trembling, but in the next second he could tell that the man wasn't moving; everything around him was instead flickering and jumping. Terror shot up his spine, and without thought he ran back into the hallway, clutching the drawing pad to his chest.
SCP-507 tore down the hallway, no regard now for his surroundings or what may be around the next corner. He looked desperately for the telltale hazard stripes denoting a service elevator, heaving for breath as he sprinted for all his worth. A set of double doors loomed at the end of the hall. He ran for them and hoped they weren't locked, lowering his shoulder and preparing to-
A grassy field. Sunlight blinded him and the sudden feeling of the wind on his face made him stop in his tracks. He fumbled for the drawing pad, and his stomach dropped as he realized he wasn't holding it any more. Had he dropped it? Half-blind, he dropped to the ground, combing his fingers through cool grass, the appearance of an endless meadow slowly coming into view as his eyes adjusted. He spun in circles, manically pawing the ground to find what he had dropped. His hand touched a leg, and he froze.
He looked up at Cassy, living and breathing in the flesh, just as he was. She was an incredible likeness of the drawing, still attired in security gear, her face a mask of shock, still processing their surroundings. She clapped her hands to his shoulders, helping him to his feet. She started to haltingly mouth words, tentative sounds of uncertainty coming forth as she tested her new environment. Her voice cracked as she spoke.
"C-can…can you hear me?"
SCP-507 stood dumbstruck, barely nodding his understanding.
She looked around at the seemingly endless meadow expanse surrounding them, the grass rippling in the wind.
"I can…hear my own voice. But I don't think anyone has ever heard me speak."
Despite the mortal terror that had gripped him just moments before, SCP-507 smiled. "Lucky me."
"What is this place? How is this possible?"
He frowned, looking out at the distant skyline. "I have this thing where I randomly teleport to other dimensions and back. Scientific, I know. If I'm touching someone, they come with me. Something about being transported into, wherever this is, must have changed you somehow. Maybe you were just in a cross-dimensional, er, something the whole time."
Cassy looked now to SCP-507. She studied his face, her hand reaching up to her own face, seemingly tracing her own features as her eyes took him in. "How long do you usually stay in these places?"
"It changes. Hours sometimes. Days. There's no way to tell. They're usually a lot weirder than this place, though."
"Can we…can we just stay here, for a few minutes? I want to just…be like this, here, for a moment."
SCP-507 looked out over the unchanging landscape. "Yeah, yeah I think that's all right. We should get moving soon, though. I want to be way the hell out of Site-17 by the time we come back to reality. Whenever that is."
Cassy nodded, and closed her eyes as she held her hands out to feel the wind breeze past them. She slowly turned in place, testing the strictures of this new, three dimensional existence. SCP-507 tried not to stare, studiously looking out around his new travelling companion. But his eyes occasionally snapped to this incredible person, a sketch on a pad of paper not minutes beforehand, suddenly transformed. Or freed.
She looked over her shoulder, back at him, catching his gaze. SCP-507 quickly averted his eyes, his cheeks suddenly flushing. "We, um, we should, uh, be getting-"
A hint of a smile crossed her lips. "What's your name? I don't want to call you SCP-507."
"It's, um, uh, well. It's, uh…"
"You don't know your own name?"
He cleared his throat, fidgeting awkwardly with his hands. "Well, yeah, but it's, um. It's kind of embarrassing."
Cassy's smile broadened now. "I promise I won't laugh. Honest."
He pushed up his glasses. "It's uh, John."
Her hands flew up to her mouth, trying to cover the involuntary giggle that escaped her lips.
"Hey, you promised," John said, laughing as well.
"I'm sorry, I just…what's so embarrassing about 'John'?"
"It's just so boring, you know? Like there's a thousand other people named 'John' within a hundred feet of you, wherever you go." He put his hands in the pockets of his jumpsuit. "And I've just, never really liked the idea of being boring."
Cassy laughed again. "I don't think being boring is a problem either of us needs to worry about."
John smiled. "I guess not. We should probably get moving."
"Right." Cassy began walking toward the setting sun, in what was presumably the easterly direction in this plane. John followed behind quickly. He tentatively touched her arm.
"Oh, uh, there's one other thing. I have to be touching the person I'm with, or they, uh, don't come back when I do." John cleared his throat. "There was, uh. An accident, one time."
Cassy stopped momentarily, and with a smile, took John's hand. His face went crimson.
They walked ahead in a companionable silence, the fear momentarily pushed back, this place a respite from whatever was happening in Site-17. The sun touched the horizon, and shadows began to dance among the blades of grass, the wind starting to bite as it brushed their faces, just a little. The unchanging nature of the landscape seemed to make time flow differently, as though each step covered the same ground while twilight gradually spread over all of it. Their focus became covering distance, as much as possible, enough to hopefully place them anywhere but within the confines of Site-17 when they returned.
When the sun had almost sank entirely, Cassy paused, still hand-in-hand with John. She turned to him.
"I'll be like I always was when I return, won't I?"
John mulled the question. His heart sank. "I'm not really sure. But it's always the same reality when I return. I'm guessing so."
It was too dark for him to see her expression. A silence descended on them. Both of them remained still.
"I'm…I'm going to really miss this. It's almost cruel, to get a taste of what it must be like to be normal, and then to have it taken away."
John thought the situation over. He suddenly squeezed Cassy's hand. "What if I kept you with me? You know, maybe it's like this every time. I mean you being, um…you, I guess. It wouldn't be the same as being a full-time, um…human, but at least we could visit occasionally. If, you'd um, like that, I mean."
Even in the encroaching darkness, he could see the flash of a smile.
"You would do that for me?"
"Well, yeah, of course! But, um, I have to warn you, it gets kind of uh, scary at times. Also really, really weird, too."
Cassy embraced him, holding him close as though she'd been welcoming back a friend who had been gone for years.
"So what else is new," she said, genuine warmth suffusing her voice. "Now, let's see if we can't put another few miles between us and it, hm?"
With renewed energy, the two walked on, hand in hand.
Night fell.
In the deepening darkness, they walked more slowly, carefully picking their steps, avoiding unseen ruts in the ground or small mounds to trip them up. The wind had intensified, and now they walked more closely together, holding their arms close to themselves for warmth, suppressing the occasional shiver.
As John picked his next step, he felt his foot bump into a hard barrier. A wall? He looked up. Only darkness, nothing resembling a structure. He felt out in front of his face, and his hand brushed the same invisible barrier. Except now it felt like it was pushing back. And in a few moments, he and Cassy felt themselves being pressed backward by an implacable, unseen force. And then he saw it.
A clear, sharp outline of a man, so black that it was easily distinguished against the faint light of the rising moon. Panic gripped him, and taking Cassy's hand he spun around and started to run. In five steps, he slammed into another barrier, pushing back against him. The black figure was there, bits of grass and dirt floating away from it, as though they were underwater. Ripples pulsed through the detritus accumulating around the man-shaped hole in the night.
"I had to search you out. You are outliers, passing between worlds. You were hazy in my sight. But not now." The figure's voice was deep, scratchy. Echoing unnaturally in the short space between it and them. It floated closer, the barrier in front of it pushing them back. "Your existence invites infinite suffering. Any pain you may feel now is nothing compared to what you bring with you."
They spun back around to run in the other direction, only to be met by the same figure. Two of them now. The same voice spoke from their left, indicating a third.
"You must atone. You will atone."
The barrier was a circle now, pushing them in from all directions, more and more of the figures appearing around them, surrounding them.
"Get us of out of here!" screamed Cassy.
"I can't! I c-c-can't control it!" John yelled.
The barrier pressed inexorably inward. It was beginning to crush them.
"I know you can, John! I know it!" Cassy held tight to him, her eyes wide in terror at the force that was about to kill them.
"Shit, shit, I'm trying!" John tried desperately to push away the paralyzing fear and concentrate. He had tried to will himself on his travels, both away from reality and back to it. All he had to show for his efforts in the past was a headache. He tried to clear his mind and focus.
Home. Home. Home.
He struggled to breathe as air was forced from his lungs.
Home. Home. Home.
Cassy struggled in vain to move her arms, and was pressed further into him. He started to feel his joints creaking.
Home. Home. Home.
He was pressed so tightly he could no longer draw breath. He felt the veins start to bulge out in his neck. This was it, this was how it was going to-
He was suddenly elsewhere. He fell to his knees and gasped for air, rolling to his side and looking for Cassy. She was nowhere to be seen. He reached to the pockets of his jumpsuit, and to his incredible relief felt the pad of drawing paper. He quickly pulled it out.
Blank.
His guts turned to ice, and he frantically looked about his new surroundings. He was in an old warehouse, from the looks of it. The dusty wooden floorboards creaked as he paced about quickly, taking the measure of the place and trying to work out where he should start looking. The building was dimly lit, the air still and close. In contrast to the cool breeze of the endless meadow, this place felt oppressively warm and stuffy. The air smelled of wood shavings and ink.
Suddenly, a bare light bulb flickered on in front of him, illuminating a patch of wall. The walls appeared to be circular. Beneath the light bulb was a large canvas. Cassy's face looked back at him, the same clean, precise strokes of the unknown artist's hand, this time conveying frozen, mortal terror.
The voice sounded from above him, unseen as he looked skyward.
"SCP-085 was the result of an experiment conducted between SCP-067 and SCP-914. Both objects have been decommissioned."
More light bulbs flickered on, one in sequence after another, traveling quickly around the circular room. Each one illuminated another canvas, each one the same frozen, terrified face. John was surrounded with the fear of his closest friend.
"SCP-085 preferred to be called 'Cassy.' She was completely sentient."
The walls lurched into motion, spinning around John as he stood rooted to the spot, helpless. Each canvas flashed by him, faster and faster, until his eyes could only make out one face, one Cassy. Her face started to move, and she mouthed something, words he could not understand, her speech rendered once more to silence.
"SCP-085 demonstrated the ability to transfer from one sheet or image to another."
The viewpoint of the canvas expanded, affording John a full view of Cassy, her arms and legs splayed out. Her fingers looked like they were starting to extend and stretch out.
"SCP-085 can only exist in a degraded universal narrative."
John gasped as Cassy's hands and arms distended unnaturally, her face now contorted in a scream. Her fingers seemed to unravel now, the clean black lines fraying and twitching, coming apart and flowing messily in the white spaces of the canvas. Her arms continued to unravel, as her legs started to distend as well. She was being taken apart.
"Prior to today, SCP-085 was unaware of its status as a threat to any chance of survival of life in this universe. SCP-085 was made aware, and then unmade."
John turned away from the horrifying sight before him, only to see the same sight reflected a dozen times all around him. Cassy's body was now a mad tangle of twisted, writhing lines slashed across each canvas, the only recognizable feature being her agonized face in a sea of abstract, haphazard strokes of a pen. The lines started to flicker as her face faded into decoherence, breaking apart into segments and dashes, hand drawn static splashing all over each canvas, engulfing the last identifiable representation to John's eyes. A mouth, wide open with untold and unknowable suffering.
The walls came to a sudden stop. The lines kept moving on each of the now separately viewable canvasses. Every little mark, every slash of what had formerly been Cassy, flowed like blood to the center of each canvas, coalescing into a single point. Each point pulled into itself, smaller and smaller, until each became imperceptibly tiny to his eyes. With that, Cassy was gone.
John collapsed, tears streaming from his eyes, his mouth agape, clutching his arms around himself. The full magnitude of what he had just witnessed was still washing over him. The black figure appeared above him, floating, seemingly looking down at him. His muscles refused to respond as he continued to lay on his back, staring up at the decrepit wooden ceiling.
"Please don't kill me," John managed weakly, somewhere between a whisper and squeak.
The black figure began to fade out of sight.
"It will not be me who kills you. It will not be anything that kills you."
The figure faded out of his view. Each light bulb went out in succession, the room darkening as the dousing traveled around the walls, in the opposite direction of their initial lighting. John was left lying on the floor, in darkness.
He heard a voice directly next to his left ear.
"Back so soon?"


The date is June 15th, 2030, and I am still a good man.
I'm 31 years old. I've been a Foundation employee for thirteen of those. I'd like to make it at least to 36 years old. The first half of my life spent being a kid, blissfully ignorant of the reality of our world, and the second half spent voluntarily witnessing that reality. It's a fair balance.
That's what I explain to Joyce Peterson, Wilmington resident and single mother of three, to distract her from the pain in her spine as I pierce the space between two vertebrae with the business end of a Mk. IV modified Schulman device. She squeezes my hand, wincing and nodding. I still haven't even heard her speak, other than the garbled, panicked rambling on the phone. She'd lost a significant chunk of basic functions before she realized what was happening; notably, how to drive a car, how to chew and swallow, and the fact that the metal rack in an oven set to 425 degrees Fahrenheit shouldn't be grabbed without a mitt. The civilian paramedics took care of that part, thankfully, but they can't fix her memory.

Summer 2030

I'm starting to worry that maybe we can't, either.
She's the seventeenth civilian I've mnesticized today. Our help number has five different lines now. Site-42's statisticians claim that the number of callers has doubled in the past two weeks. One of them offered to show me the graph, but I declined. I was certain I'd just be looking at an exponential curve, and I don't need to reinforce what I already know. Not about this, and not at this point. Joyce is yet another entry in a list of thousands of names, soon to be buried under hundreds more as Site-42 scrambles to help Wilmington remember everything 3848 makes them forget.
The youngest of her boys sticks his head out of the kitchen, wiry brown curls hanging in front of his tear-soaked face. He asks me if his mom is going to be okay, and I tell him of course she is. He tells me that he wants to be like me when he grows up, and I tell him that he's very brave. I don't tell him that I'm worried he'll never have a chance. Out of gratitude, his mom offers for me to stay and eat dinner with them. I tell her that I have work to do, but I appreciate the offer; I know that I mean it, because the fact that she offered lingers with me for the rest of the day.
The date is June 16th, 2030, and I am still a good man.
I'm on-call today: technically off the schedule, but out wearing the uniform and driving the car regardless. I manage to make the short drive from my townhouse to the grocery store without issue. In the parking lot, I step out of my car and am immediately rushed by an older man with bloodshot eyes, who grabs hold of me by my vest straps and begs me to take him with me. He sobs, his cries drawing attention as I walk toward the store, telling me that he's forgotten where he lives and wouldn't want to go back anyway if humanity's protectors would please just keep him locked away deep under the surface of the world that's causing him so much pain. The few people in the lot are staring like vultures.
I'm not allowed to take people anywhere, I inform him, but if he needs help with his memories, we're doing our best to provide that service. I offer him a card, and he snatches it and hobbles away down a near-empty aisle, wiping his face. I walk to the next aisle; also barely anything left on the shelves. The same goes for the one after that, and the one after that. I settle for a case of beer — one of the least popular brands, as the alcohol section is also almost empty — and walk back to the front of the store. The cashier doesn't make eye contact with me, and the civilian police guarding the door watch me the whole way as I walk out of the store and get back in my vehicle.

Date: June 17 2030 12:34
From: Eric Radford (of.pcs.nimda|drofdare#of.pcs.nimda|drofdare)
To: Mallory Wickerford (of.pcs.ces|drofrekciwm#of.pcs.ces|drofrekciwm)
Message Subject: This is not effective.
Attachments: none
Message Body:
Mallory,
I have not been able to reach the regional director, the Ethics Committee, or even the personnel requisitions department in five weeks. To say that something is seriously wrong is an understatement. We watched this develop, and it is my job to face the music. 3848's effects on Wilmington are uncontainable. Lethe Events no longer follow a recognizable pattern, and as of early this year, appear to affect individual people and specific concepts rather than entire areas and the same concept. We have no way to track or predict this type of activity, and 3848's document hasn't even been updated for it, as I have no way of knowing if the rest of the world is experiencing the same effects or if this is unique to our area.
We cannot support the Wilmington population — let alone the human population — with one-on-one, small-scale treatment. We do not have enough field agents and we do not have enough mnestic devices. Agent Trauss alone had 65 hours on the clock this week, and he is only one of five people in the job position. If your research department does not deliver a wide-scale application method, it is unlikely we will succeed at all.
This is my fourth attempt at communicating with you this week. I have checked in-person at your office twice and have not found you. Please respond immediately. I will help you and your team however I can.
With utmost urgency,
Eric Radford
Director of Site-42

Date: June 17 2030 12:36
From: Internal Autoreply (of.pcs.krowten|ylperotua#of.pcs.krowten|ylperotua)
To: Eric Radford (of.pcs.nimda|drofdare#of.pcs.nimda|drofdare)
Message Subject: Failed Delivery
Attachments: none
Message Body:

Your message to the following recipient(s) could not be delivered:
Mallory Wickerford (of.pcs.ces|drofrekciwm#of.pcs.ces|drofrekciwm)
Reason(s):
gateway timeout error
Servers are not responding. Please try again in one (1) hour while network maintenance is performed.
This is an automated message. Do not reply.

The date is June 17th, 2030, and I am still a good man.
Today is Cleo Palazzi's 21st birthday. She tries to make small talk with me, and we discover that we went to the same high school, albeit ten years apart.
She awoke this morning with a screaming pain behind her eyes; there was a white light, she said, and then burning in her skull. She called to tell us that her brain felt as though it was being split open, and that she had a hole in the head. It was a recognizable pattern — I had the augenlappen recall script saved as one of the first presets on the Schulman device due to how common a case this is — but Cleo is dead in my arms only minutes into the procedure. I wait for the sheriff and coroner to arrive before I let go of her body, and as I drive away, I'm bothered by the potential chance that the spinal tap is what killed her.
I relay my concerns to the dispatcher. He tells me that there's nothing I could have done. I drive back across town, past my house, and into Site-42's gate to spend the night in my office, finding some semblance of comfort in knowing that I'm behind three perimeter fences and a few dozen meters of concrete and earth when I close my eyes.
The date is June 18th, 2030, and I am still a good man.
At 9:30 in the morning, a timid, young researcher named Thomas is my first subject.
"I hope I'm in the right office. They told me you could do it." He lingers in the doorway, lanky fingers gripping the handle for several seconds after he's turned it. "I work just down the hall. If you need me to go to someone else, I can."
I motion him in, trying to brush the night's wrinkles out of my shirt. "You're fine. You need the compliance script, I take it?"
He nods and bites his lip as he steps inside. "It's mandatory now, right?"
"Yes, but you won't have a problem with it once it is in effect."
He shudders. "I really wish it was called something else."
"It's not the most marketable name. But it's safe."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm the first person they tested it on. Believe me, it's safe."
I remember my hesitation when Wickerford showed me the first developed ED-K+ script on the first Foundation-approved programmable mnestic device; anything based on a Marshall, Carter and Dark design was not an object I wanted half-anomalously transferring information into my brain via my spinal fluid. I remember not being able to read and understand the code on the screen, and I remember how inexplicably violating it felt to have a synthetic thought pattern wedged into my core behavioral traits and made to look like it was natural. A Foundation researcher constructed what is now a permanent part of who I am, and I would be lying if I said that isn't disconcerting.
But we need it. There's no question about that. I know for a fact that if I hadn't let Wickerford program unquestioning dedication to the Foundation into my brain, I would probably be dead or worse by this point. There are plenty of things the former me wouldn't have done which needed to happen nonetheless, and in hindsight, I'm glad the Foundation put me to better use that I would have. We adapt to what the universe throws at us; when the anomalous world fights dirty, the O5s and Ethics Committee typically aren't opposed to throwing some of that dirt right back. Not when it's in the interest of humanity's protection. If all of that means getting my hand in the mud every now and then, so be it. We can't afford to act otherwise.
"The lead researcher in my lab said that there was supposed to be a bigger version of this. Something that did it to hundreds of people at once." The young man seats himself on the couch as I snap on latex gloves and change out the syringe bracket.
"I know. I don't know what Wickerford is doing right now, or where those results are, but that was her project."
"What's it like outside?" he asks after a beat.
"What's it like? I don't know, I suppose it's almost normal." I start replaying the past several days in my head. "Well, lots of road closures. Stores almost emptied out. Very few people around in general. I think most people just stay in their houses."
"What about all those jobs? Who's working the stores? Who's in the office buildings downtown?"
I pause and blink. "Well, come to think of it, I don't really know." I clear my throat and swallow, mouth feeling dry and hands cold. 'I don't know' is too common in my vocabulary nowadays. "All I do know is that people are losing their memories very quickly, so I take one fifth of the calls and respond to people who need our help."
"And you drive to these people and use this device on them? Does it work?"
"To my knowledge, yes, it works. But as you mentioned, we need Wickerford to finish her research so that we can broaden the scale."
As if on cue, my cell phone rings. I remove my gloves and answer it, leaving the mnestic device half-prepared on the desk. "Site-42 Offsite Response. This is Agent Trauss speaking."
"T-this is the SCP Foundation?"
"That's correct. Are you experiencing an emergency?"
"I- fuck, I- God, I'm sorry. I just- I have a hole in the head. Isn't that how you said it?"
"Do you feel you have lost memory of a previously well-understood concept, object, or-"
"Oh God, yes. Yes. Outside, I was- I looked up, and- oh Jesus Christ, I'm not making any sense, it hurts to think about-"
"Do not interact with or think about the concept causing you distress. I'm in the middle of an urgent task at the moment, but if you give me a minute I can check if another operative is near you."
"I live on Sedgley Drive, I'm right beside your facility."
"Okay. Please wait and do not panic." I mute the phone and switch to my earpiece. "Rogers, Shaw, are any of you available for a call response? I've got a lady on the phone and I'm tied up in the office for at least another 30 minutes. She's right there in the neighborhood beside 42, should be quick."
"Got it," Rogers answers after several seconds. "What'd she forget?"
"Something involving 'looking up'. Maybe clouds, maybe the fact that the Earth orbits the sun. Can't say for sure, so you're going to have to pick up the call on line 3."
"Alright, will do."
I breathe a sigh of relief and thank him before turning back to the researcher. "Sorry about that."
"It's fine." He shifts uncomfortably on the couch. "I'm sure you're sick of people asking this, but how much is this going to hurt?"
"Spinal taps are not pleasant in and of themselves, but I will warn you that there is a separate, distinctive sensation associated with the information transfer itself, accompanied by vivid and intrusive thoughts of the subject matter in question. The procedure lasts approximately 20 minutes, maybe fewer. It's important to note that you will likely feel as if you are nearing unconsciousness, while not actually losing it, for the duration."
He grimaces. "I should lie down, I guess."
"Whatever is most comfortable."
Thomas's face is streaked with tears only a few seconds after I've cleaned the injection site and inserted the needle into his spine. I let him grab onto my free hand with his sweating fingers, his eyes wide-open and pained as they stare toward the opposite wall.
"You're doing very well. The script is five percent loaded," I tell him. My fingers are turning white in his grip, but I don't make him let go.

Date: June 19 2030 09:38
From: Eric Radford (of.pcs.nimda|drofdare#of.pcs.nimda|drofdare)
To: Recipient Group: 42_OSR
Message Subject: Commencement of Project Oceanus
Attachments: briefing1.pdf
Message Body:
To the agents of Site-42 Offsite Response,
Following emergency executive approval from the Ethics Committee after several weeks of no contact, I am officially moving forward with Project Oceanus. Researcher Mallory Wickerford's department is not on track to develop effective wide-scale targeted mnestics within a reasonable time frame, and as you of all personnel are aware, we cannot afford to wait any longer.
In all future call response cases, please treat affected persons with the latest rendition of Wickerford's compliance script (the civilian version, not the employee version — please use caution and ensure files are correctly named and moved) in addition to any concepts the individual wishes to recall. Moving forward, we cannot afford to encounter resistance from the civilian population under the circumstances set upon us by SCP-3848's activity patterns. If collective mnesticization must occur on a small scale for the time being, it needs to be as straightforward as is possible.
If, after one month, we see an improvement in the numbers, the O5 Council will approve Project Oceanus for application in other sites. I am confident in this department's performance and expect that you will achieve a favorable end result quickly and effectively.
Thought is the frontier on which we are currently fighting the anomalous, and if thought is not regulated, scripted, and carefully supervised in this era, we will not have necessary leverage against the anomalous forces attempting to disrupt it. It is our position collectively — and your position directly — to protect humanity from the influence of the anomalous. I am confident that this motion, as questionable as it may seem, is in the best interests of both humanity and the Foundation.
This is a mandatory operations assignment. Please call me or come to my office with questions.
Respectfully,
Eric Radford
Director of Site-42

I close the email window and copy compliance_v3_civilian.edk from inside a folder on my desktop to one of the USB drives. I remove it from the computer and pack up the mnestic device, feeling sweat bead on my forehead as I open my front door.
The date is June 19th, 2030.
I start my car and pull onto the empty streets, a dark gray storm brewing over the river.


It was the end of the fucking world and MTF-Sigma-66 were doing what they always did: getting themselves killed.
"So to be clear, this place is going to be toe to tits in guards, covered in goddamn traps, and might not actually have anything in it?" Dominic Alvares pulled on his tac suit gingerly, careful to avoid brushing against the stump of his right arm.
Under a chorus of groans from the two other veterans of the group, their newest member piped up with nervous optimism.
"Well, you know, this time we know there's a good reason for it, right?" said Charles Bouche, their own pet anartist. "The world is going to shit, and we might be helping out." Bouche shrugged as if to acknowledge the naivete of his words. This didn't save him from Aries' disdain, though, nor the boot she expertly pelted across the locker room to hit him in the ear.
"Shut the fuck up, Douche." she growled, stalking over to snatch the boot back up. "We don't help shit. Haven't you been listening to anything people have been saying the last few weeks? They're sending everyone everywhere. We're just following one more thread."
Bouche, for his part, didn't say a word, avoiding looking at any part of Aries. The blood witch always cut an imposing figure, of course, but Dominic reckoned the avoidance may have had more to do with the fact that Aries had abandoned changing midway through pulling on a sports bra to berate him. Ah, well, the kid would grow used to that in time, if he survived long enough.
Fenton, their fourth member, put a hand on Aries' shoulder, wordlessly nudging her away from the kid. She shrugged him off and returned to her pile of gear. Unlike the others, Aries worked light, foregoing the protective tac vests the other wore for basic underclothes and a large many-pocketed jacket, revealing cuts and bruises covering every part of her body, from her shaggy legs to her shaved scalp. Dominic's lip curled slightly as he took in her face.
Almost a year ago now, Dominic had been pulled out of a torturous limbo by Aries and Fenton, on orders from their new handler, Alesha Willow. Their old handler, well, that was the face he took in now. Aries had possessed the woman he'd once known as Via Davis at some point in the time he'd been stuck in his cold hell, and nobody would tell him anything more about it. Fenton claimed it was before his induction to the MTF, and all Aries would ever say was they'd had 'a disagreement at the movies'.
He didn't know why the face bothered him so much - it's not as if he'd liked Davis before, the woman was a power-abusing bitch with no regard for the safety of anyone on the team - but a year later he still couldn't look at her without feelings of disdain. Across the room, Fenton was staring at him quietly behind his ever-present shades, sensing his mood. He rubbed a knuckle against his cheekbone and brought himself out of it, grabbing some fresh pants.
Later, when they were all ready, Willow rapped on the door to the locker room, entering before any of them could respond. With her was a heavily-tattooed Asian woman in maybe her 30s or early 40s, her entire left side covered in ugly burn marks.
"T minus fifteen til you're heading out, guys." said Willow, not even looking at them as she scanned a large chipboard clipboard. "Make sure you've got all your shit, prepared magic or whatever. Uh, this is Dr Way, she'll be joining you for today."
"Emerald." said the woman, giving a small wave to nobody in particular. "Most people call me Emmy."
"She one of yours?" asked Fenton, eyeing Emmy suspiciously.
"Yes." said Willow, at the same time Emmy said "Fuck no." Willow frowned at Emmy slightly, then turned back to Fenton.
"She's a contractor of sorts, from Serpent's Hand. She'll be… helping you remember anything you forget, I guess." Willow glanced at Emmy, shrugging her shoulders subtly. "That about cover it?"
"I'm affiliated with them, not employed by them." Emmy said firmly. "Otherwise I wouldn't be here right now. But yeah, I guess it's fine as explanations go."
There was a short silence as everyone waited for someone else to jump in. When nobody did, Willow gestured for Dominic to follow her, and asked the remaining members to get Emmy geared up and head to the standard assembly point. As the doors closed behind Willow and Dominic, Emmy reached into her pocket with her good hand and pulled out a crumpled baggie
"Any of you smoke weed?" she said, flapping the baggie invitingly.
"Fuck yes" responded all three together.

"I still think this is bullshit." said Dominic, grimacing as he used his fresh new arm to switch gears. Why the hell had Willow neglected to mention he'd be getting a goddamn limb replacement in the ten minutes before having to drive a heavy vehicle, and how the hell had they just stuck it on like he was some broken action figure? He pulled slowly up the gravel path that led to their destination, what appeared outwardly to be an abandoned "tuna" cannery.
As Dominic wondered idly what tuna was, Aries groaned from her hiding spot at the back of the van. He was pelted in the back of the head with a stuffed lion, one of the many children's toys they were "delivering" to the covert Marshall Carter and Dark facility they were tasked with breaking into.
"Cut it with the grandma crawl, Alvares" Aries huffed. "Do you have any idea how cramped this is? Douche's boots are in my fucking face."
There was a tiny apology from Bouche, quickly followed by a yelp. Dominic could only imagine what she'd done to him, as before he could ask he saw a lone figure strolling toward the van from the factory. The first of the guards, a portly older man with a carefully calculated boredom baked into the lines of his face. The transparency of the ploy was enough to make Dominic smile with genuine enjoyment as he rolled down the window.
"Hey there!" he called, leaning out to let the man see his face clearly. The guard's expression didn't shift an inch.
"Yer lost, fellas. Nothing here for ye unless you've got the pizza I ordered an hour and a goddamn half ago." The man, who's nametag read 'Rupert', shone his flashlight into the cab, and Dominic could swear he saw a tiny frown as he saw Fenton. Whether it was because the man was black or because he was wearing shades at 1 in the morning escaped Dominic's judgement. How much could you really trust someone called Rupert to not be racist?
"We're here with a delivery for the facility, actually. MC&D trans-dimensional whatever, right?" Dominic's vagueness wasn't just an affectation - this was practically all he knew about the place they were throwing themselves into blindly. "We've got a shipment from Wondertainment. Should be on your list?"
If he'd expected Rupert's expression to change at this, he'd have been disappointed. The man's gaze swept over the van, and paused as he took in the logo on the side.
"If yiz are Wondertainment, how come yer logo here says S & C Plastics?"
"Well, uh," Dominic faltered, grasping at straws. "We're manufacturers. Plastics. Plastic… toys. We make the plastic toys." He smiled wide, hoping to cover the lie with charm he severely lacked.
Rupert was scowling now, maybe, his eyes just a fraction narrower.
"A manufacturer wi' initials that just happen to spell out SCP?"
Shit.
"Yeeessss?" he ventured, but Rupert was already pulling out a walkie-talkie. Dominic and Fenton both scrambled to open their doors.
"Boys, we got janitors at the gate. Immediate backup requested, code-" The old man was cut off as a streak of red and black barreled into him, screeching.
Aries was atop his shoulders in a second, toppling out of the back of the van, Emmy and Bouche falling to the ground as she pounced. Her teeth clamped around his throat and she bit down hard, ripping a strip of flesh away with a jerk of her head. Dominic skidded to a halt three feet away from the two, keeping out of range of the man's flailing limbs. Behind him, Fenton lightly jogged up and started helping the other two off the ground.
Aries shoved her hand into the man's mouth to stop him yelling, and he bit down immediately. Dominic could hear the crunch of snapping bone. Rather than be pertubed by this, Aries seemed to take it as a cue, spitting the man's blood on his face and frantically smearing a sigil on his cheek and then her own.
Rupert bucked her off and stumbled back onto his ass as one of Aries' fingers fell out of his mouth. Aries rolled on the gravel and scampered up before the man could, then yelled some command words, in the kind of magic language Dominic forgot as soon as he heard it.
The effect was immediate. Rupert's eyes rolled back in their sockets and he fell onto his back, juddering. Before he could wonder whether the man was having some sort of fit in response to the copious blood loss, his eyes were drawn by a much more unusual sight. Aries' body was transforming, her face melting and pooling into a different structure, breasts receding and stomach pudging out. As greying hairs sprouted from her upper lip, he realised what was happening - Aries was becoming Rupert. God, as if wearing Via's face wasn't bad enough.
Rupert (Aries?) stood up and dusted himself (herself?) off.
"Fuuuuck me," said Aries, scratching at her new-formed facial hair. "Do you know how much that takes out of me?" She attempted to stretch, popping her joints loudly. "This will only last five or six minutes, so let's make the most of it."
She leaned down, groaning as her back clicked in complaint, and grabbed the walkie-talkie.
"False alarm, uh, me laddies." she said, her voice two octaves too high. "Sure don't mind what I say, me mind's going down the pisser. Uh, Copy."
There was a long silence, the walkie talkie faintly crackling as Aries waited for a response.
"Do you think we got away with it, or-"
The unmistakable sound of a bullet pinging off the side of the truck cut her off and all three of them threw themselves to the ground.
"Apparently not!" Dominic yelled, as more bullets pinged against the van and thumped into the ground around them, sending up little explosions of gravel. He glared at Aries. "How did they see through our foolproof ruse?!"
She flipped Dominic the bird. Behind her, Fenton stood, removing his glasses to reveal the sparkling voids where his eyes should be.
"Don't matter." he said, a slight grin on his face as bullets whizzed past him. "They have no idea what they're up against."

Dominic's vision swam as he pushed himself up onto his knees. A quick check to confirm he still had all his fingers and toes, and he allowed himself a moment to breathe a sigh of relief. They'd made it. What the fuck had Fenton done? Nothing had made sense for about five minutes, their bodies and minds separate, screaming through the security guards, and then they'd been at the door of the facility.
Dominic stood, looking around to check how the others were doing. Fenton was helping Emmy up, wrapping an arm around her waist to support her on a broken leg. Ok, not good. Aries was already up and exploring, staring up quizzically at the opposite wall. Bouche was gone.
Aries turned to look at him.
"Do you have any idea what it is?"
He looked up at where she'd been staring, at the huge sign on the wall. Above the words "WHITEBOX 5" was a logo - a circle with three arrows pointing inwards, surrounded by a bubble outline. Nothing he'd seen anywhere in their briefing document on Marshall, Carter and Dark.. It felt… wrong. A thing that didn't belong, that was at odds with reality. The longer he stared, the more wrong it felt, a buzzing emptiness just behind his eyes.
He pulled his gaze away from it.
"Careful, feels weird. Might be some visual cognitohazard, last line of defense." He pulled himself up, ignoring complaints from his joints.
Aries considered, then nodded, turning to face away from it and down the hallway, where the hum of giant computer banks could be heard. This place was for more than storage of items, then. What kind of information was valuable enough to store it outside of reality?
Dominic tapped his earpiece.
"Willow? We're in the facility now, advise on how to proceed."
There was no response. They were cut off, either outside the range or just entirely disconnected.
"W-we should investigate the o-object storage, I guess," Emmy said, "Follow the symbols?"
Dominic glanced at Fenton, but the man seemed as mystified as he was at this.
"What symbols?" said Dominic.
"The- the ones all over. Can't you see them? The walls are c-covered." Emmy coughed hard, and Fenton's grip at her waist tightened as he looked around. His expression remained confused, and as Dominic looked around, he could see why - the walls were spotless, nothing on them but the circle and arrows sign.
Seeing that none of them had any idea what she was talking about, Emmy slipped out of Fenton's grip and hobbled toward the wall. With a ripping sound, she pulled pieces of paper off the blank wall and stalked back over to the others with them. Dominic looked at the paper she'd seemed to conjure out of thin air, and squinted, struggling to read a perfectly legible handwritten journal entry, dated to 1999.

The thing isn't doing this by accident. There's reason and rhyme to it, just not any I understand. If we're to have any hope of stopping this virus, if the concept spear doesn't work, this might be our last hope.
I can feel its pull on me. It wants the part it recognises, the eye lobe.

Dominic dropped the paper as a spike of pain stabbed through his head. Something was very very wrong here.
"Get up, idiot." said Aries, lightly kicking him in the leg, and he realised he'd dropped to the floor too.
"How is this not affecting you?" he said, twisting to try to get up again.
"It is, I'm just not a baby about it." she said, pulling him up one-handed. She squinted at him, cocking her head. "Your right eye is bloodshot. Wasn't before."
He shrugged her off, following after Emmy and Fenton as they slowly followed the paper trail.
"Hey!" she barked, dashing to get in front of him again. "Look at me!"
He opened his mouth to retort and, before he could say anything, she spat in it. He recoiled, disgusted, and grabbed her by the collar, not sure what he was going to do. She kicked him in the shin, hard, and he dropped her, holding his arms out to stay upright as his leg buckled.
Then he felt it. The buzzing spike of pain receded - not quite gone, but numbed, enough that he could bear it. He looked up and saw Aries scowling at him, awaiting her apology. She swayed slightly, and Dominic realised she hadn't warded him to the effects - she was simply taking on the pain for him.
He walked around her and wordlessly started toward the object storage room.
—-
Object storage was huge - he was reminded of an IKEA storeroom, with shelves stretching all the way up to the ceiling dozens of metres up. The shelves were covered in numbers and codes, and again that symbol, the circle with the arrows. What had once been an insistent buzzing behind his eyes was now a dull hum as he frowned at the symbol. It was right at the tip of his…
The tip of his what?
He panicked as he felt an unfamiliar presence in his mouth, a slimy mass pushing softly against his teeth. A few feet down the stacks of shelves, Aries recoiled, a hand shooting to her face. He opened his mouth to shout something to the others and the mass moved, curling upward to rub against his upper teeth. He clamped down hard and felt an explosion of pain from somewhere inside his mouth. Was it biting him back?
Aries clattered into the shelves, toppling carefully arranged objects. Ahead of her, Emmy's head whipped around in Fenton's arms. Fenton seemed too preoccupied to pay attention, preusmably also affected. Dominic realised too late the thing's hot blood was flooding his mouth, and when he gasped for air it rushed down his windpipe, drowning him.
"Iss attassed hoo my mouh." said Aries, pulling a razor blade out of her pocket. Emmy stumbled out of Fenton's distracted grip, lunging wide-eyed for the witch.
Dominic's vision swam as Aries and Emmy grappled. His legs weakening, he fell to his knees and let a spasming cough rack his body. Something was lodged in his throat now, a chunk of the thing he'd bitten through, and his breathing was totally stopped now. He was face to face with one of the objects, a broken glass eye that stared quietly at him. Beside it, a folded cardboard sign designated it SCP-4113-2.
The blurry shape of Fenton was between Emmy and Aries, trying to push them apart, his eyes bright pinpricks in Dominic's ever-darkening vision. Emmy was yelling, something about tonnes? Tungs? His head was buzzing, trying to figure out what Emmy was talking about, why the letters and numbers on that sign seemed so familiar, how to fucking breathe.
The two women toppled into Dominic, and he passed out.

Dominic awoke face down on the ground, face pressed uncomfortably into the dirty tile floor. The first thing he became aware of as he surface was a roaring ache in his mouth, as if he'd bitten straight through his tongue.
Right through his…
Oh, shit.
Dominic tried to push himself up and was almost immediately countered, a confident strength that was unmistakably Fenton's pushing down between his shoulder blades firmly.
"Hey, Alvares?" Emmy's voice said softly, somewhere above and behind him. "I need you to stay real still for like three more minutes, ok? There's a Mark 2 Schulman device embedded in your lower spine right now, and if you move too much you could paralyse yourself."
Things were shifting in his head, changing. His tongue, his fucking tongue, how had he forgotten that? Had there been a Lethe event here? Could there even be one, if this place was truly outside of reality?
Dominic wanted to ask why there was a fucking machine in his spine, but a more pressing question came to mind first.
"Why didn't it affect you?" he said, twisting his head to try to look at her. His tongue burned as he talked, and it was hard to form the words. "All of us, we were freaking out, or whatever Fenton's version of freaking out is. But you were fine. How can we trust you're not somehow involved in this?"
Emmy moved around him so he could just about see her face, staring seriously into his eyes as she hunkered down into his line of sight.
"Willow told you, back in that locker room." Emmy said "I'm here to help you remember the things you forget. It's my job to remember things." She lightly tapped the small weight on his lower back. "And to do what it takes to help trigger your memory too."
It wasn't an answer, not really, but he was physically unable to focus on that. His brain was still rearranging, reminding him of things he'd been physically unable to recall moments ago. Tuna! Delicious fucking awful fish! He could pinpoint when he'd lost the memory, too, taking a pee break during a long stakeout of some magic kids who were pissing the Foundation off with a giant sentient paperclip they'd set loose on the streets of Brooklyn, giving unsolicited advice on how to guard against various anomalies. That was months ago, when Nettle had defected, betraying the others when the kids had covertly disabled their explosive necklace.
"How long til I can get up?" he said, put out by the memory. He'd thought he'd got close to Nettle in the time they'd spent together as a team, and the betrayal had, well… it had stung.
"Just another minute, probably." said Emmy, biting her lip. "Depends on the person. Just let me know when you see the- when you see it."
"See what?" he said, but even as he asked he could feel the biggest roadblocks dissolving in his mind and he felt his brain working overtime as his vision changed without changing, suddenly seeing the thin grey-pink tendrils that covered every surface of the place, lightly pulsing and waving, the tips of the tendrils reaching away from the surface they ran along to feel at their surroundings. It wasn't just his vision that was changing but his sense of touch, feeling the tendrils exploring every inch of him lying on the ground, sneaking into his mouth and nostrils, wriggling beneath his torso. He yelled and wrenched his head away, and the tendrils slid out of his face easily, no fight whatsoever in them.
"See that" said Emmy, smiling, and she set about removing the device.
A series of bips told Dominic she was entering something into some sort of keypad, then he felt the very odd numbed sensation of a needle sliding out of his spine, the dull pressure turning into a pinprick of pain. With it removed, he rolled over gingerly to look up at Emmy and Fenton, standing over him with concern.
"Normally," said Emmy, "I'd tell you to stay still for a couple hours to heal after a spinal tap. Unfortunately, I don't think we have that."
Wordlessly, Fenton handed him a small notepad, open on a page with a list of words. Dominic read them out.

tongue
Oklahoma
tuna
the name 'Dick'
squash (sport)
4:4 rhythm
combustion engines
Korea
tendrils everywhere

"Tongue, Oklahoma, squash, 4:4, combustion engines, tendrils" Fenton repeated back briskly. The man seemed tense, his arms crossed tightly over his chest and his mouth a hard line.
"He wrote those down as he was surfacing," explained Emmy, "things he'd forgotten that he was starting to remember. But now…"
"Now you're forgetting again" said Dominic, gazing up at Fenton. "How long do we have?"
"Not sure." Emmy said, shrugging one shoulder. "Twenty, thirty minutes before you start losing things again. I'd estimate maybe an hour and a half before you go back to biting chunks out of your tongue."
Dominic nodded and started pushing himself up slowly, taking Emmy's offered hand to get to his feet.
"One last question," he said, "where's Aries?"

They found Aries on their return trip to the atrium, sitting cross-legged by a pile of papers she'd ripped from the wall. Dominic had realised as they'd made their way out of object storage that he could see them now, the scribbled words and symbols that covered everything, obscured only by the creeping tendrils that covered every surface.
A few of the symbols he recognised, symbols meant for instant transfer of information into the brain, like magic QR codes. The majority, though, was just words and phrases - "Don't forget" and "Read the pages" mostly, though a handful of times he'd noticed the much more specific "Daisy Glover has been missing for two days", written in different materials and different handwriting. Weird.
Aries jumped a little as they turned the corner, then settled as she saw who they were. She had a long clean gash along the side of her mouth, slicing her cheek into a lopsided grin. Emmy evidently hand't been totally successful in stopping her from cutting her tongue out, then. The cut was held together with rough stitches, the kind he knew Aries had done herself without much care to how it would look when it healed.
"You're done with your little nap, then." she said as they drew close, and pulled a paper out of the stack to her left, flapping it at them impatiently. "A lot of the rest is bullshit, whining about how he'll never see his family or whatever, but this one says a lot."
Dominic plucked the page from her hand, and was pleasantly surprised to find he could read it without issue, the handwriting perfectly neat despite how small it was, covering both sides of the page.

I wish I could say I regret what I did. I honestly don't remember enough to say either way. I know I was certain it was right when I did it, and the flashes of the war I do remember…
You can't be prepared for it. War is one thing, and it's hell, but when those things got into your head they became you, there was no escape. They tell you about idea creatures, cognitohazards, they never tell you those things can physically slither inside you and lay their eggs in your personality. A virus that you catch when you think you catch it is bad enough, but when that virus can alter you, make you want it for others, when you're not trapped, possessed, but actively enthusiastic about what you're doing, that sort of shit doesn't leave you.
The first person to try to kill me was my daughter, when she saw what I was becoming. Daisy, I think her name was. But she wasn't strong, not enough to take down a veteran in his prime. I want to be more horrified by that, but I honestly don't think I'm capable. I don't remember her in any way that matters now. Don't remember anything about how she looked but flashes of her face as I choked her.
In the end, I guess I was snapped out of it. The things weren't impossible to fight, they just made you not want to. Disgusting parasites. Of course, if anyone could torture you into crawling out of your own skin, it was the Foundation. They needed me, I think, to be the man who pulled the trigger. The concept spear was unfinished, imperfect, built to combat an enemy who was already overrunning us when development began.
We had no idea whether it could do what we hoped. Whitebox 5 was R&D on the bleeding edge of the foundation's tech, even before what I did. Stitching together eye-lobes, what Dr. Schulman insisted on referring to as augenlappen. Making a thing that could target thought, memory, desire. Yes, they explained what they believed it would do. What they knew the side-effects could be. Why do you think I stole it? They weren't going to use it, after everything. I guess I thought I knew better, that anything would be better than what was left of us.
I've left us crippled, vulnerable. Our science is backward, not just hindered but capped - I've made it impossible for us to learn things that were pillars of technology before the spear. Quantum physics, studying the eye-lobes, moving through second and third temporal dimensions. Stuff we used to be able to do with ease. Irreversibly retarded the whole damn endeavour. But we stopped it, the virus. It's still out there, but it's crippled. Not able to affect the mind, not able to spread in the way it wants to.
Whoever you are, reading these journals, I understand if you want me dead, want me brought to justice, court martialled. If you just want to rip me apart yourself. Understand that I want that just as much as you do. But I have to stay here, to keep watch, to try to stop it from doing what it wants to do. It's just running through the program endlessly, wiping memories from whole towns. I can't stop it, don't know how, but I can slow it down, keep it fed on the doctors who pass through here, fattened on their memories.
If you find a way to stop it, if I'm truly no longer necessary necessary then please, kill me on sight. My name is Roland Eckhart, Admiral of MTF-υ-4. I do not regret my actions.

A long silence passed.
"Bit melodramatic." said Emmy, scratching her chin.
"What does it, uh, what does it mean?" said Dominic, frowning "This place is Foundation?"
Aries groaned dramatically, snatching the paper back out of his hand.
"It means we're it. The team who found the source of all the thingy events, the memory loss." She gestured to the pile of pages she'd been reading. "There used to be a better world, this guy fucked everything up with some sort of organic weapon, they're still here somewhere. If we find them, maybe we can turn it all back, save the goddamn world."
Aries pushed herself to her knees, pulling loose of the tendrils that had gently surrounded her legs as she'd sat.
"Look, I know that note doesn't tell you everything - I've been reading this shit for like an hour while you and the big dude got your little back massages, there's so much fucking more to all this - but trust me, we gotta go find this thing."
"I believe you" said Emmy, without a trace of hesitance.
After a moment's surprise, Aries nodded curtly and turned on her heel, stalking toward the computer banks. Dominic looked at Emmy curiously, and she shrugged with her working shoulder.
"I have reason to believe her." she said, and hurried after Aries, who was mumbling to herself.
"I've been exploring - all this shit, the, the wavy little dudes, the…" Aries shook her head, hand over her eye, and it occurred to Dominic she'd been out longer than Fenton. "The tendrils. They get thicker as they lead this way, meeting up. It's branching out and out, like a nervous system or a, a-"
"A tree?" Fenton offered. Looking toward the other corridor, Dominic could see she was right - the tendrils were much thicker that way, moving from the hair-thin fingers they'd encountered in the object storage rooms up to throbbing pipes as thick as his arm. He imagined they'd only get bigger deeper in.
"A tree, yeah! With all the green, uh, green round things."
Dominic wondered - she'd been so sharp just a minute ago, talking about the pages. What was happening that everything else was so fuzzy?
"Aries," he said, trying to be gentle without her thinking he was being patronising. "Can you go over the plan again?"
She laughed harshly, a short bark.
"Forgetting already, are you? Guess that machine didn't do its job." She hopped over a larger tendril as they passed through the doors and into the computing banks proper. The room was massive, easily three stories tall. I occurred to dominic They were getting really big now, enough to make movement slower as they stepped over them. "It's simple - we find the bioweapon, maybe also this Eckhart asshole, figure out a way to turn it off, stab him a little, go tell them we saved the world, maybe get extra pudding cups with our prison food. Simple."
"Ok," said Dominic, "and what's my name?"
They all stopped as he said this, Aries turning in confusion.
"What? You're… you…" Her expression changed, from confusion to frustration to fear. "You're the guy. The annoying one who moans about everything. You, yhuu…" Her speech slurred and she clapped a hand over her eye as she swayed, her trembling legs threatening to buckle under her.
Alarmed, Emmy dashed over to catch her, and Aries fell into her arms, knocking them both to the ground. Dominic just stood in shock.
"Oh, fuck." said Emmy, quietly. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. she's going much faster than I'd thought." She glanced at Fenton for just a second, furtive, then turned her attention back to Aries, pulling out the device that had been in his spine fifteen minutes ago.
Aries slapped the device away, irritable.
"It's the… the words, the… fuck. I know what's… stuff. Just can't say."
She growled as Emmy again tried to apply the device, kicked out.
"No!" she barked, rolling away and standing up shakily. "Gotta get the… find the brain. The monster and the man." Dominic could see she was shaking, but she stood tall, sure. "The poky metal. We put it in him. Make him think different. It. Make it… Put the poky in the, the, ghhh…"
She was pushing her palm into her eye socket hard now, hard enough Dominic was worried she'd damage it. Quickly, he ripped a strip off his shirt and handed it to her. Taking his meaning wordlessly, she wrapped it over her eyes, blocking out the light.
"Still not good. It's… ow. Let's go." She spun and marched back in the direction they'd been headed, slipping on the larger tendrils but refusing to fall. With a worried exchange of glances, the others followed after her. Emmy kept the device in her hand, tapping keys as she lagged behind.
Deeper and deeper into the computer banks, where the air was hot and muggy, they found it. A mass of grey matter as tall as the room, engulfing a three by three block of the computer banks, tendrils as thick around as Dominic's torso sprouting from it at irregular intervals and planting into the computer banks, casting shadows like tree branches overhead. Sightless, Aries stopped a few feet in front of the monstrosity, seeming to know where she was. She slumped quietly to the floor and in seconds the tendrils were covering her, wrapping around her limbs with ease and pushing into her mouth.
"Aries!" yelled Dominic, running to free her, but his arm was caught by Emmy, who gestured wide-eyed to the ground around them. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he began to he'd stepped into a ring around the thing, a carpet of tendrils that covered the ground completely. Within this ring, he could see bumps in the ground, all of them the size and shape of the bump that now swarmed over Aries. Looking at his feet, he could see the tendrils were gently moving to cover his feet, slow and considered. Around Emmy's feet, though, at the perimeter of the ring, they were thrashing violently, soundless but angry, gripping at her boots with force. He let himself be pulled out by her, and they both stepped well clear.
Had Aries known? Was this a trap she'd led them to, implanted in her mind by the thing, or did she really think they could stop something here? The tendrils were still now, enclosing her body fully, wriggling only slightly in contentment.
"What the fuck is this thing? Dominic said, stepping back out of the field of wrapped bodies.
"It's… a brain. Or, a web of parts of them." Emmy said. She bit her lip, considering something. "They told me, uh, there's more to this than they briefed you. I don't know if I should - whether you're cleared. I mean, you're not, but under the circumstances it's-"
"Tell us." said Fenton, firmly. With a start, Dominic realised this was maybe the first thing he'd said in twenty minutes.
"There's… they captured a man from here. Schulman. He created the device that gave you back your memories. He wouldn't tell them about their construction, or maybe couldn't, but he was able to lead them to his emails. They got locked out really quickly, but they were able to skim some stuff before they were locked out and - this thing, it's some hybrid thing he was building, or maybe thought he was building. If what Aries said was true, it's been here far longer, decades."
The name Schulman was familiar, and Dominic realised it was what she'd called the machine in her hand, the one she'd been fiddling with since trying to use it on Aries for a second time. A Schulman device. She was still messing with it as she talked, typing on a miniature keypad with her thumb.
"I don't actually know for sure why you guys are affected and I'm not." Emmy admitted, glancing at them to see their reactions. "But I have some idea. Years ago, I saw something. Helped create it, in fact. It left me with these scars and, and holes in my memory. It took years of training with the Serpent's Hand to get those memories back. I used to think it was just, um, standard Foundation mindwipe. Amnestics. But what Aries was saying…"
Her fingers were shaking a little on the keyboard of the device, slowing her down.
"There used to be a better world, right? With better science, understanding of, of fundamental principles we can't grasp any more. This thing wiped them out. But I- I think the thing I made, the angel, I think it's something we weren't supposed to be able to make. We got around it by creating, not remembering. I remember all these nights of headaches, the pain behind my eyes - but we all thought it was just the grind, working nights through to the next days to get things done. It- it wasn't, was it? It was this, this feeling you've all been having. I've been actively fighting this thing for, for a decade without knowing it. I think I'm just, I'm harder to crack." She giggled, looking up from the device's screen. "You're all noobs."
To his left, Fenton wobbled slightly. Emmy's smile dropped instantly.
"Fenton, your list." she said, sounding almost like a mother reminding a child of their chores.
Fenton stared at her, frowning.
"List?"
"Fuck, fuck. Yes, Fenton, your list. Tongue, Oklahoma, tuna, Dick, squash, 4:4 rhythm, combustion engines, Korea, tendrils. Repeat that back."
"Tongue, uh…" Fenton pulled off his shades, rubbing his cheekbone with his knuckle. His eyes, usually a sparkling void, were dull and average, staring vaguely at Emmy as she put her hand on his shoulder. "Engines, tendrils. Why am I doing this?" He glared at her and Dominic. "Who are you?"
Emmy deflated. Whatever it was, when this thing struck, it struck hard. It had taken Aries' ability to communicate almost totally, and now Fenton was going too. It could be a matter of minutes or seconds before he was like Aries, wordlessly succumbing to the thing.
"We're friends, ok?" said Dominic "We're here to help you. Just, just sit down and we'll talk to you in a moment, ok?"
Fenton shook his head, frustrated.
"No," he said, "No, I don't trust this. There's memories going everywhere right now, left and right, all over. All over. You could just be capitalising on a vulnerable man. Trying to get my trust."
"Memories going is why you should trust us, ok? We're your friends, we work together, you just don't remember that. If you can't trust yourself, trust us." The man seemed dissatisfied, but after a second he nodded and leaned against a computer bank behind them, positioning himself in a corner where he could watch them both. Sighing, Emmy pulled the Schulman device from her pocket and began typing with her thumb again.
"You've been fiddling with that thing for the last fifteen minutes" said Dominic. "What are you doing? There's nobody else to help."
"I'm reprogramming it." Emmy said, not even looking up. In his corner, Fenton was listening in suspiciously. "This thing doesn't just bring back memories. The Foundation folks, they found out they could use it to… implant things. Ideas."
"Like Inception?"
"Sure, like that" she said, exhasperated. "That's what I'm a consultant on. I helped them build a language to program that stuff. It's tech magic, the sort of stuff I specialise in with the Hand."
"Did you do that to us, when you were, you know, stabbing us in the back?"
Emmy shot him a dirty glare at his phrasing.
"When I was stopping you from choking to death on your own tongue, no, I did not implant any concepts in your head. Not that I know of, at least. I'm working on a standard package someone else developed, so, I dunno, maybe some compliance shit. Nothing major. What I'm doing now, however…" She looked over to the lump where Aries lay, the tendrils around it flushing now from grey to pink. "This was Aries' idea. I have no idea how she knew. 'Make it think different'. She thought we could reprogram it, stop it eating memories."
"And you can do that?" Dominic said, raising an eyebrow skeptically.
"I don't know" Emmy admitted. "It's - I've never written one before, nothing that was intended for practical use. And I'm working with the worst possible tools and…" she sighed, defeated. "And I'm starting to get the headache."
The pink flush in the tendrils was starting to spread from where Aries lay. Where it touched the edge of the ring surrounding the brain thing, it began to spread, new branches sprouting from the existing tendrils to entirely cover the surface. Was it coincidence that the ring was moving toward them? Dominic put the thought out of his head.
"What are you trying to program? What thought?"
"Just… smaller. Less. I can't get it to stop entirely, not if that goes against its entire nature, but if I can just sway it to prey on individual people maybe I can slow it down. Give the Foundation time to, to figure something out." Emmy shrugged her shoulder, resuming typing.
The wait for Emmy to finish typing was long, unbearable. Dominic moved over to Fenton, trying to console him as his thoughts slowly went, trying to ignore the urgent worries in his own head, reminding him he would be like this sooner rather than later. Soon, Fenton was nonverbal, grunting and clutching his hand over his bloodshot eyes. He started trying to get up, leaning toward the still-growing ring of tendrils that surrounded the bioweapon.
Dominic tried to push Fenton down, but the man was strong, twisting his arm til something popped and tossing him aside. Shoulder probably dislocated, he tried to grab at the tails of the man's jacket, but missed. Resigned, Emmy just watched the man march into the ring.
The tendrils parted under his feet as he walked, wriggling happily, then clamped down when the man fell to his knees. Slowly, they tugged at his chest, pulling him down into a bow and then engulfing him completely. In seconds, Fenton was gone.
"Fuck!" Dominic yelled, pain and frustration bubbling up from his core."Fuck, fuck fuuuuuck. Emmy, please tell me you're done. I don't want to- Fuck, I'm not going into that shit, ok?"
Emmy looked up at him, her eyes apologetic.
"Soon." she said "Soon."
He paced restlessly, the bipping from the device burrowing into his head, engulfing his thoughts. Your name is Dominic Alvares, he thought to himself, You've survived two goddamn years doing this shit, and you'll survive longer. The woman with the machine is Emmy Way. She's Hand, you can trust her. Trust the Hand, trust Emmy. Your name is Dominic Alvares…
Ten minutes later, Dominic's legs were getting tired, and Emmy stood.
"Dominic. Dominic, hey!"
He turned. Your name is Dominic Alvares…
"What?" he said, frowning at the machine in Emmy's hand. What was-
"Dominic, tell me what tuna is. You don't need detail, just tell me anything about it." Her face was serious, worried. You will survive this.
Dominic shrugged.
"Never heard of it." He said, honestly. Probably some anomalous thing. "Two na?"
"Ok," said Emmy, nodding. "Ok, this will have to do." She pressed a few buttons on the device she held in her good hand, and it made a loud bip. Trust the Hand, trust Emmy. "It's compiling now. This should only take a minute, but I'm afraid you might - Dominic, I want you to listen really carefully, ok?
Your name is Dominic Alvares. She was talking to him. He nodded.
"Dominic, I don't know what's going to happen when I try to work this. If I - if something goes wrong, I need you to take the needle here - " Emmy turned the device around so he could see a sharp needle that protruded from its bottom. " - and push it into that thing there, ok?"
Looking up, Dominic could see a huge creature, grey and pink, with arms that stretched through the room. How could he not have noticed that before? You will survive this. He nodded vaguely, still gazing at the huge thing.
"Ok, ok, and then the only other thing you need to do is press this green button, ok?" She pointed with her thumb to a button marked EXECUTE. Trust Emmy. Dominic nodded again.
The woman smiled. The… Emmy. Emmy smiled. She smiled, and she turned and walked into the mass of pink. Instantly, the pink began to move. Writhing, angry, it grabbed at her, closing around her scarred hand, a hand she couldn't move. She yelled for him.
Your name is Dominic Alvares. Dominic rushed in after her, ignored by the pink. It was only after her, after Emmy. Seeing him, she yelped, and held out the machine. She'd been talking about it, hadn't she? It was important. Dominic took it.
"Stab it in the fucking back." she said, grinning, and the pink surrounded her.
You will survive this. He was alone now, in a room filled with the whirring of fans and, this close to the beast, the gentle sucking sounds of its movements. It was a soothing sound, it calmed the buzzing in his mind. Dominic looked down at the lump of metal he held, the sharp point angry in his hands. Why would he hurt this thing?
Trust… the woman. The woman was gone, but she had asked him to do this. He leaned forward, unable to move his feet, bound by the pink. With a grunt, he pushed the spike into the grey flesh of the thing. He expected it to cry out, but it made no sound. Instead, the pink below him writhed faster, climbing his legs.
Your name… There was one more thing he was supposed to do. He knew this, but he didn't know what it was. Like a million tiny tasks you forgot as you moved to do them. Like walking through a doorway he couldn't walk back through.
Your name is…. The pink was around his chest now, climbing his arms. His head screamed, the pain behind his eyes so blistering he could barely see. He stretched, reaching for the device. The pink was at his wrists, writhing urgently to wrap around his fingers. He was just in reach of the keypad, his fingers brushing against the buttons.
Dominic Alvares. He pushed the green one. Maybe it was right, maybe it wasn't. He couldn't see what the screen said as the pink spread over him, filling his mouth to stop him from screaming. The pain in his head was all he was, all he'd ever been.
You will survive this.
The pink pushed into his eyes, behind them, moving with a hungry precision. For a second, the pain was gone.
And then Dominic was gone too.

ACTION REPORT: FINAL MEASURES, JANUARY 2030
PRIORITY 1 (Upsilon-4): FAILURE - NO WIDELY-DISTRIBUTABLE CURE FOUND
PRIORITY 2 (Rho-1): FAILURE - ASSET DESTROYED IN HANDLING. ALEXYLVA UNCONTACTABLE.
PRIORITY 3 (Iota-0): FAILURE - APPEAL TO KNOWN ANOMALOUS INFLUENCERS NOT MANAGED
PRIORITY 4 (Alpha-1): FAILURE - BLANKET O5 PROTECTION NOT ACHIEVED. O5-6 COMPROMISED.
PRIORITY 5 (Sigma-66): FAILURE - MIA
PRIORITY 6 (Delta-3): FAILURE - QUARANTINE IN THREE PORTLANDS UNACHIEVABLE. LETHE EVENTS OCCURRING WITHIN CITY BOUNDS.

O5 COUNCIL MINUTES, FEBRUARY 5 2030

SCP-3848 status changed from Keter to Uncontained.
O5-6 replacement suggested: Dr Nuru Jua (Director, Site-91)
Vote held for change in status of Operation Oceanus from Rejected to Pending: Passed, 9-3
Vote held for change in status of Operation Oceanus from Pending to In Effect: Passed, 7-5
Vote to upgrade Operation Oceanus to Priority 1: Passed, 7-5

END OF MINUTES


« Archival Document — HSA-008-Advent || Black Sunrise || Operation AEON DAWN »

Somewhere in the woods, Nazi-occupied Norway, 1944 . . .
Knock knock.
Benedikt Holzer rushed down the stairwell of the nameless manor. There was an unexpected guest at the door.
Knock knock.
Moonlight streaking through cracks in the barricaded windows guided Benedikt's every move. As the gears behind his eyes churned every faint beam of light became a laser of daylight, exposing every mine's outline and every ritual dagger's tip. His feet artfully dodged around the boobytraps and his hands rested firmly on the pistols in his pant pockets.
Knock.
His flow was disrupted. A foot slipped and he threw his body to the left before any limb could meet an explosive fate. There was the faint rustling of metal as his head slid into the barbed wire lining the railings.
Knock.
"I'm coming!" he shouted between spits of blood. Benedickt placed his hands on the railing's underside and pushed, tearing what was left of a face from the metal tangle. Before any blood and oil could stain his uniform he unbuckled a metal faceplate from his belt and strapped it around his face. It had no facial features, simply eyeholes. Luckily he had no need for a face these days.
He jumped down the stairwell for the last few steps and sprinted to the door. He flicked a switch by the handle and awoke the intercom system, leaning into a repurposed radio transceiver nailed on. He spoke.
Knock—
"Greetings. Could you identify yourself?" No normal person had any reason to waltz through the layers of security outside to visit a long abandoned mansion. No normal person would have lived to be knocking on this door.
"No need. I only have a few questions on your manor."
Gravelly voice. Fluent German. Old. A dispatch from Obskuracorps? A visiting warrior priest of the Thule Society? If either were the case, why had no message been delivered by command announcing so, and why would the messenger refuse to be identified?
"Sir, you will need identification—"
"Again, no need. Only a few questions and I will be leaving."
Benedikt unholstered a pistol and pressed the barrel against the door, finger gliding onto the trigger.
"If you insist. What questions do you have?"
"What is this place?"
"It's an old mansion once owned by ancestors of Minister President Vidkun Quisling. It has to be kept off limits due to structural instabilities." Both lies.
"I see. Do you know when it was built?"
"Some time in the 1800s." One of the last structures the Norwegian occultists of Nyrsigtuna ever built.
"Hmm. Now, have you realized I could sense your aetheric aura?"
"I— Would you please repeat that?" The gun barrel wavered.
There was a thunderous crack as the door burst inward, chunks of wood propelling into Benedikt's torso, gun spiraling far behind onto the marble floor. The air around his hands heated in a short-lived attempt at a thaumic counterattack before the bulky mass of the radio transceiver rapidly met his neck.

If no alarms had been triggered in the skirmishes with the perimeter guards then surely one would be triggered now.
Special Operative Josef strode over the bloodied wooden shrapnel and kneeled to inspect what was left of the door greeter. With a thick clay hand he plucked a flashlight from his Allied Occult Initiative-issued fatigues and shone it on the masked severed head.
"Are you still there?"
Gears pushed past layers of viscera and jutted out of the neck, jerkily rotating and wheeling over to the torso. With a series of clicks it fastened to the body, reheaded. The greeter jumped to their feet.
"Y-you're the golem of-"
"Of Prague, yes." He grasped onto the greeter's arms and clenched, feeling the metal bones soften like clay. "What is your name?"
"Benedikt—" Coughing. "Lower Priest Benedikt Holzer." The beheading had dropped his voice by an octave, now accompanied by a constant, faint sound of radio interference.
A Thule Society member. Josef was certainly in the right location, though that was clear from the moment he stepped into the intense aetheric energies surrounding the manor. "Benedikt, what has the Society been doing here?"
"We've been… experimenting."
Josef glanced at his surroundings. Decrepit neo-classical architecture drenched in sandbags, barbed wire, and any fortifications imaginable. On appearances alone Benedikt's claim didn't seem far-fetched. Enough documents had been found by the Foundation to suggest that the Thule were using the place to develop an ersatz Key, a replacement for one of the mystical objects they needed to complete the Rite of Solomon and become the sole thaumaturges in the world. Benedikt wasn't telling the full truth, though.
"Is that why you have Mekhanite structures in your body?"
"M-mekhanite? No, the Aryan ancestors built far better—"
Megaphones through the room screamed their panicked alarms, rising and falling over and over before fading. Josef sighed. Interrogation had taken far too long. Interrupting a beginning pseudoscientific diatribe, Benedikt was beheaded again, with Josef forcing his hand through the torso's neck stump and stripping it of the connecting cogs.
"Reconsider how important you think Germanic peoples are," Josef said.
The floor-bound head jittered in response.
Doors at the top of the grand stairwell burst open to a chorus of gunfire. Obskuracorps soldiers clad in black fired down, riddling the ground with metal studs. Josef sprinted around the side of the stairwell and barreled through a set of doors to its left, tumbling into a long hallway. Above the glass shards of old ceiling lamps were dangling electrical lamps, providing the faint yellow light for him to spot the cthonian sigil traps etched into the floor.
It would have prevented a mess if Josef hadn't stepped into one as he barged in. He stepped forward but collided with walls of sulfur dust now encasing the sigil's edges. Holes to somewhere impossible emerged around his feet. Cyan tendrils lunged from below, wrapping around his limbs as he thrashed. The demon's wolf-like head rose up on a serpentine body and stared into his chiseled eyes. It growled.
Before it could open its maw the two tendrils encasing Josef's arms were torn apart. A holy water pack in his fatigues was just burst by the constriction. The demon screamed before Josef's fist tore through its jaw and down its throat, the other hand pulling out two teeth for later use. With bursts of aetheric energy the demon's body solidified and crumbled into a cold dust. Exorcised.
Six seconds until the sulfur walls collapsed. An Obskuracorps officer barked by the door, likely ordering their platoon to fire the moment Josef exits. More than enough time to prepare. He holstered the teeth, brushed exorcised demon dust from his fatigues, grasped a grenade and pulled its pin. Four. Three. Two. One.
The sulfur shattered into glass-like chunks. Gunfire erupted. Josef hurled the grenade through a crack and kicked a chunk forward, grabbing several as they fell in slow-motion and arranging them in the air as a barricade. He rushed forth as an explosion tore apart the barriers and several soldiers. Bullets tore past his fatigues to hit his body, the small cracks in his clay form like the pricks of what he imagined a needle felt like.
He weaved around further sigil traps. A soldier clad in rusted chainmail lunged from behind and was swiftly knocked head-first into a trap, vanishing behind more yellow walls. Josef took cover, mentally blocked out the screams in the sulfur tomb, and thought. When the AOI had run undercover aether scans of the manor before he invited himself in, they found the magical aura surrounding the area was the most intense around a large chamber in the far back. Now that he was past the entrance he could feel it wafting across his mind as well. To keep moving forward would bring him to his mission objectives and something dangerous. Something Thule and Obskuracorps should never have.
The door at the end of the hallway opened. An Obskuracorps Commander — face covered by a mask like Benedikt's though painted with far more runes — stepped out. Strapped around one hand was a leash that led to a skeletal thing. Bones surrounded by yellow flames, three magenta "eyes" staring intently at Josef, the ends of all six arms broken and replaced with assault rifles. The Commander tugged on the leash and jerked the beast's head, the sealing nails embedded in its spine thrumming in response.
Thule had learned how to control a demon.
All gun-arms opened fire, belching a burst of blackened bullets that left dark scar-like trails through the air. Josef dodged. The bullets struck the sulfur walls of the trap once behind him and bent it like fabric. They pushed through to tear into the soldier's gorey remnants and the heads of the demon feasting on it, sucking the bodies inwards until they went inside-out and shrunk to fleshy motes. Ones stuck in the floor were still twisting its tiles in small marble cyclones.
"Bastard," Josef muttered.
For the first time since training he reached for the assault rifle — specially designed for his bulky hands — on his side and pulled the trigger. Bolts of thaumic energy launched from the barrel, fueled by the thaumaturgic potential of Josef's own body, arcing to the Commander's head. Their right arm split through their black uniform sleeve into three bronze limbs. Thaumaturgic shields projected from the hands. The bolts desperately whizzed around the iridescent barriers for a weak point but the arms moved too fast. All were blocked and absorbed as fuel.
Josef forced one last surge of energy into the gun. He plugged its barrel with a demon tooth and hurled the gun in a path that would bring it to the Commander. More bullets came from the soldiers by the hallway's start but now the only ones to care about were from the skeleton. He ran along the wall while breaking off wooden chunks, each meeting the projectiles and slowing their approach. More black trails snaked toward his feet. He jumped and threw a grenade that rolled ahead.
The grenade blasted the hallway's wall open. Josef dipped onto the grassy field outside, embraced the cool breeze, then dived back into the chaos under the veil of wooden debris plumes. The clogged gun landed behind the Commander and finally buckled under the pressure of the energy within it, incinerating itself and the tooth in a blue fireball. A metal arm twisted to block the inferno with a shield. Only two were left to halt Josef.
The two arms merged their shields and the Commander raised a glowing pistol, ready to fire the moment their defenses were lost. Josef retrieved the second tooth and stabbed it through the shields. He drove a foot down on it like a wedge. A gash tore through. He budged the two arms apart while twisting the other to cover the Commander's gun. They fired. The bullet went nowhere. Once the shields vanished it only took a swift punch to force the Commander's gear guts out of their chest.
Leaving the body to gracelessly collapse, Josef spun to face the demon. It had stopped firing. Even the soldiers ceased their fire. Now that the fighting had lessened he began to notice the fine details along the skeleton's body. Carved illustrations of towns, depictions of warriors, commoners, children, all with a six armed skeleton. Runes spelling "defender" on its forehead.
The demon was never a malicious force. It was a guardian of this region, extant for far longer than Josef, Nyrsigtuna, or any modern occult group. This wasn't what it was meant for.
Josef retrieved the pistol from the coat of the presumably deceased Commander and — after breaking the trigger guard meant for human hands — fired a round at every sealing nail. All shattered with ease. Heat erupted from around Defender and each gun-arm shattered, replaced by normal arms manifesting out of thin air.
It stared. He nodded. It nodded back.
Josef left the hallway and closed the door, not a single soldier daring to fire. A few paces forward and he heard the faint screams of panicked soldiers running from a force their commanders thought they could control.
With every step into the dining hall turned weapons storage room, the aether grew denser. Josef's movement continued as normal yet it felt as though he was wading through water, the thaumaturgic energy high enough that it repeatedly manifested itself in blue sparks that bounded about the crates of guns, miraculously not willing the explosives to life. His destination would be past the next set of doors.
He paused. He had a choice now. With much of the manor's defense ruined he could leave, report on his findings to AOI Command, storm in with a full squad of thaumaturges, and finish the job. Time that could grant Obskuracorps the precious reprieve they needed for recuperation.
The aetheric sparks continued their dance, briefly spiraling into a circle around his head before dissipating yet again. Something in the chamber ahead began humming.
"Wise men foresee the consequences."
Josef walked forward and bashed through the door's locks. He stepped into the chamber.
JOSEF.
The High Priest's voice felt more akin to a hammer to the head than actual speech.
"Knowing my name isn't impressive."
Ancient relics were jammed into the center of the chamber: a celtic cross, bronze spheroids lined with mechanical arms, a broken statue of a four-armed being. Atop stood the High Priest. Stygian blue tendrils wormed around and between the cracks in the artifacts, melding into the priest's back to feed them with thaumic energies. It was the origin of the aura. It was a site to develop a new Key.
You have a Key of Solomon, Josef.
The High Priest raised his arms; one mechanical, the other whirling light. Their black robes and armor rustled as the aether billowed about their position atop the artifacts. To Josef the chamber felt more like a gaping abyss by the second.
Give the Key and I will let you live.
"You seem content making a Key for yourself."
Will you?
One was not enough for the Rite.
"Will you kill me regardless?"
That is not an answer.
Two swords launched off the floor and into the priest's hands.
"You already know what it is."
Every inch of Josef's hands became lined with glowing Hebrew text.
Then so be it.
The High Priest shot forward, swords scarring the ground in a blaze of sparks. Harnessing the Key within him Josef spun the dense energies around his body and thrust to the side, attaining a brief weightlessness as he set his sights on the relic pile. With an aerial pirouette a second thrust sent him careening to the pile. The High Priest chanted. Dozens of flaming daggers appeared and entered pursuit of the golem. Josef's Key clicked and the gaseous forms of specters faded into being, assembling into a ring around his body. The daggers reached their prey only to vanish into undead hands.
Josef collided into the four-armed statue, cracking a limb off of it. The arm flailed as if alive. There was a flare of light. A spear of meteoric iron longer than any human rested where the limb once existed. Josef raised it high.
Before a new plan could be formulated the High Priest dived in. Both swords clattered into the spear's sides, leaving not even a dent. The priest accelerated. Josef pushed back. Screams emerged from the spirits as they swirled around the priest, slowly disintegrating from the blue energies flaring all around. Cracks emerged in Josef's arms and nonexistent nerves seared. The air burst with heat.
Josef lessened his grip and fell backwards. The High Priest surged ahead, knocking the spear to the side, and he slammed deep into the pile. The stygian blue tendrils shredded themselves apart. The pile violently exploded. Fires and debris swept over Josef, evaporating his fatigues and liquefying any tools he had. Behind hellish flames the cross, spherical devices, and all else in the pile sank into a molten pit that bent the chamber floor into itself. He stumbled back, dragging the spear with him.
The great aura of the manor whisked away like dust in the wind. Any major thaumic powers Josef had were gone.
NO.
In a plume of liquid metal the High Priest, wreathed in robes of embers, emerged. His two swords were now white-hot liquid pillars yet they remained in his hands.
OF ALL DEATHS, ONE AT THE HANDS OF A STONE BARBARIAN WILL BE NAUGHT.
The priest soared to Josef. Both swords spun like wheels. Thrusts of the spear parried every attempted jab and Josef twisted it, stabbing into the priest's chest. Boiling blood trickled out.
NAUGHT.
The stygian blue tendrils returned, spilling from the High Priest's wound and stabbing through the spear, prying at its cracks until it shattered into seven-pointed fragments. His fist raised and Josef jolted into the air.
NAUGHT.
Duplicates of the swords emerged above Josef's chest, dripping metal across him. They all thrust in. The Key within his body churned within his insides and repeatedly bounded up. His mind screamed.
NAUGHT.
As more swords positioned above his head, preparing to gouge out the word of truth engraved on his head and erase his life, Josef heard a manic screech at the chamber entrance. In seconds the freed Guardian was upon the High Priest. Every magenta eye stared deep into their soul. Before he could react the Guardian had already carried them high to the air. Three skeletal arms punched into the priest's chest and exited on the other side.
I…
The fists phased out of the body and let it descend. Josef fell out of the air.
will…
The priest's mangled body landed next to Josef.
not…
A lance of magma grew from their shattered mechanical arm and raised over the golem. Josef pushed himself off the ground.
die.
A single punch was all it took to extricate the High Priest's mind from his head.

Josef strode across moonlit fields away from the burning manor. The embers released by the occult devastation had spread through the building's corridors, lighting the entire structure ablaze. The last Obskuracorps soldiers within scurried out of windows on the ground floor, lives far more important than what little was left of their research. He watched the burning over his shoulder. A crackle and the whole structure collapsed into a scaled-up bonfire.
The faint roar of tanks bounded over the plain from afar. The AOI was sure to be confused when they found their reconnaissance mission had turned into decimation. Josef would either be lauded for valiantly stopping experiments on Rite of Solomon components or sternly spoken down to by Command for breaking valuable artifacts and protocol. He didn't care which outcome it would be.
There was a yellow glimmer. Josef looked to see the Guardian standing the edge of the woods. It gave a last nod before its body dissipated into gasses that flowed into the surrounding trees and grasses. A flash of magenta from the wildlife and all was calm.

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