+++CURRENT PROJECT "Leveling The Playing Field"
Phillip McAleer slipped a finger under his shirt collar and tugged it away from his neck, and regretted for the fifth time using plenty of starch that morning. He'd wanted to make a good impression on his first day with a crisply ironed shirt, but between his stiff ballistic vest and the edge of cloth digging into his neck, he'd developed three or four good itches in the first twenty minutes of his familiarization tour. He wasn't good at dealing with small irritations, but he knew how important first impressions were. Composed, calm, carry yourself in a military manner. Look like someone who'd keep his head when things got hairy, he thought. At least my partner isn't a jabbermouth.
Gustav Bricke (“Pronounce it 'brick' and call me 'Gus'”, he'd said) avoided the classic tour guide mistake of assuming the person being guided is a moron. Bricke had passed by the bathrooms without wasting time to point out the bright red doors with the words “MEN” and “WOMEN” clearly stenciled on them in tall, white letters. Instead, Gus had explained the different color-coded stripes that led along the hallways, and carefully gone over the procedure for opening the many portals that led to the detention wings from this hallway, which itself could only be entered from the main security hub. Bricke demonstrated the routine, and then made Phillip go through it three times until he could do it without prompting.
“Fingerprint, then eye scan, then the number code, then swipe your card last. In. That. Order. Listen for the voice response, and then give only one hard pull on the door. If it don't open, you go through the whole thing again from the top. You hear that female's voice from the panel?” Bricke said.
Phillip had heard the voice saying, “Code received.” It sounded like an older woman, intelligent and friendly, with an accent he couldn't quite place. He would have bet anything that she was a military brat, someone who followed their parents around to different posts as a girl. His voice had a similar quality: not quite Southern, not quite Midwestern, not quite anything.
“Sure, I heard it,” Phillip said.
“That's the proper response this week. If you go through the opening sequence and hear anything else, ANYTHING – different voice, different words – you stay put.”
“What else would I hear?” Phillip asked.
Bricke waved the question away. “Just repeat after me. You hear something else, you do not move, you do not touch the door, and you call it in, and wait for a team to come get you. Get it?”
“I stay put, and call in and wait for a response team. What happens if I pull on the door more than once, or get the order wrong?”
Bricke stopped and smiled. “If you get the order of the sequence wrong once, it raises a flag in a supervisor's station. Then they'll pull you aside and search you before you return to the entry center.”
“Damn,” Phillip said.
“Get it wrong more than once, they'll lock you in and send a team to search you - a real search - and bring you back to be detained and interviewed before you can leave. That's a huge pain 'cause that's at least two hours before you're cleared. At least.”
“They interview you to make sure you aren't drunk on duty or something?”
“They mostly interview you to make sure you are still you,” Bricke said. “and if you hold any of these door handles for more than five seconds, you get a nice shock, enough to put you on your ass. Just go through it like we practiced, and get to the security briefings posted on the green board.”
“You get tasered if you grab the door wrong?” Phillip said. He chewed on that for a second. “I bet no one comes to briefings late.”
Bricke laughed. It was the honest laughter that hits when something funny catches you by surprise. “Ha! They sure don't, Phil."
* * * * *
Phillip was awakened from a dream by the staccato beeping of his alarm. He reached out and found the off button, but there was that moment where his dream-self and his real body interfered with each other, and he nearly pushed the clock off his nightstand. A second later he heard a loud slap as something hit the floor.
In a moment he was on his feet, grabbing at the picture frame. In the dark he ran his fingers over the surface of the glass, then he held it up to the early dawn light filtering through his blinds. Picture, glass, and frame were all intact. He carefully set the frame back on his nightstand. In the photo, a woman with short, black hair was leaning into Phillip, her bare arms around his neck, her teeth set firmly on his earlobe. She was taller than him, maybe twenty years his senior, dressed in a bright linen vest and sundress. Her eyes were closed, and her smile lines gave her face a look of joyful determination. His right hand was around her waist, but his left hand was impishly pinching one of her breasts. His mouth was wide open in laughter and surprise; he hadn't expected the bite. Behind them were a few trees by a pond. Harlem Meer, Central Park, he thought. I always wanted to see New York City.
He stood and made his bed, smoothing the blankets over her side. It had been nearly two years, and it was still her side.
* * * * *
Gus and Phillip were sitting at one of the many tables in the Site 19 cafeteria. Their shift this week put their midday break at an awkward hour of the afternoon, but the cafeteria was still more than half-full. Around one table were other security personnel, and a few aisles away about a dozen researchers clustered together. In one corner a tall, broad-shouldered man sat at an isolated table.
A zone was cleared around that table, and Phillip had found out why last week. He made the mistake of trying to cut past the man with a little beet salad and coffee that he'd wanted to take back to his guard station. The guy was headed to the bathroom, and Phillip had nodded hello and gone by. Gus was coughing, trying to hold back a laugh as he reached over and opened the cover to the plastic container. The salad was black goo, and the coffee had separated into foggy water and grounds which were turning gray as they watched.
The chairs at the corner table were the unpainted steel kind Phillip had last seen in grammar school. Gus had told him the tall man's name was Cain, pronounced KAH-een ("Like 'buy in' but with a 'k'," Gus had said.). He looked to be about thirty, maybe Arabic or Greek, with a neatly trimmed beard. Where his arms came out of his shirt, they were a pale white, like porcelain buffed to a high shine. They reminded Phillip of the good china tea set his mom had inherited. Cain was eating slowly because a young woman, maybe sixteen or seventeen, was chatting away at him while painting curly designs on one of his arms in bright orange. She was obviously having fun, and Cain had that look adults give to children who draw on them - tolerant and loving.
"It's kinda like high school again," said Phillip.
"Brother, you ain't kidding," Gus said.
A plump woman in thick glasses was holding court, obviously one of the senior staff. She was smiling and nearly shouting as she told her story, gesticulating wildly with a ruler in one hand and an enormous cup of coffee in the other. Whenever she finished making a point, she would punctuate her sentence with a swing of the ruler or a shake of the cup, either sending coffee spilling over her subordinates with abandon, or forcing them to duck and weave away from the dangerous piece of wood. He noticed that one of the buttons on her blouse was buttoned into the wrong hole. The unselfconscious way she carried herself made Phillip like her immediately.
"Who's that lady, with the glasses?" Phillip asked.
"Oh that's err… Light? Bright? I always get them confused. She's one of the good ones." Gus replied.
Phillip was glad to be rid of his body armor and weapon. He kept rolling his shoulders and smoothing the front of his shirt where the vest had dug in. He noticed the balanced, three-sided SCP Foundation symbol, black on silver, on Gus's shoulder patch, and suddenly missed his old crossed bayonets.
* * * * *
END TALE DRAFT
First Archive Project? — rewrite 0f 056
Item #: SCP-056
Object Class: Euclid
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-056 is to be kept in a 115 m2 suite in the main building of Site-███. Level 1 personnel and above may interact with SCP-056 at any time they choose, for a length of time not to exceed sixty (60) minutes. The subject is to be guarded by a minimum of three (3) security staff at all times, with shift changes every four hours. Each guard is to be armed with non-lethal tranquilizer pistols, loaded with no less than fifteen hundred (1500) microliters of cyclopyrrolone tranquilizer. Any irregularities in the behavior of staff developed by exposure to SCP-056 are to be reported, and will result in psychological examination and reassignment to duties off-site.
The Site Director will be provided with a reasonable budget in order to accommodate the very frequent requests made by SCP-056 for new art and furniture. However, the subject is never to be allowed weapons, communication devices, an internet connection, or other SCP objects. The subject has access to the recreational (and other non-sensitive) areas of Site-███, and may request short walks in the monitored outdoor sectors. The Director may, at their discretion, approve or reject these requests for material or outside access, subject to limitations of space and the security of the Site and its personnel. In the event of an emergency, or if SCP-056 becomes violent, it is to be subdued and contained within its room. At no time should personnel attempt to harm SCP-056 (see Addendum 2b).
Description: SCP-056 is an entity whose perceived size and appearance varies in response to the environment around it, especially the presence of living and sentient beings. Its most common form is that of an athletic man in his late-twenties, dressed in a uniform similar to that of the security personnel guarding it, but of higher quality materials and custom tailoring.
SCP-056 has been known to appear as:
- A large, well groomed Labrador Retriever (when exposed to Doctor █████ ████'s dog).
- A woman similar in appearance to the film actress ███████ ██████████ (when passing by a group of younger female staff).
- A female doctor in a white lab coat when speaking with various researchers. When asked to take an IQ test, the subject scored nearly thirty (30) points higher than the highest scoring researcher available.
- A male bodybuilder, who was able to lift nearly two-hundred and fifty (250) kilograms twice on a bench press machine in the Sector's gym. This was thirty (30) kilograms heavier than the strongest security guard's maximum at the time.
- A contoured couch upholstered in red suede (when left alone in the subject's suite).
These changes occur at moments when all people in the area lose focus on the subject, which occurs immediately upon exposure to a new object or person (see Addendum 3). The subject's clothing will also appear to change during this time, though SCP-056 has yet to manifest any sort of tools or weapons. Recording these changes has proved difficult, as any video or film camera monitoring SCP-056 at the time of a transformation suffers a power surge, misfeed, or other malfunction which damages the relevant frames (see Document 056-4g for a complete list of these malfunction events).
It has also proven difficult to view SCP-056's original, or unobserved, form. When left in an empty concrete cell and under closed-loop video surveillance, it appeared as a higher-quality camera monitoring the camera watching it. At the same time, SCP-056 had no detectable mass or life signs, including body temperature or heart beat. Researcher Zhu has proposed that the subject's anomalous properties are triggered by the perception of a sentient being, but this work continues.
SCP-056 is capable of speech, and has shown fluency in over 200 languages and dialects. Personnel in contact with the subject often report feeling "jealous" or "unsatisfied", yet give a great deal of both positive and negative attention to SCP-056. Security staff often claim that they wish to follow the subject's commands, even if they dislike it, while researchers in extended contact with it will often start arguing. It frequently treats the staff around it with disdain, though it is generally willing to do whatever is asked if it is approached in an obsequious manner. It prefers conversations about current events, fashion, automobiles, theoretical science, and sports, and requests books and other information on these topics. Personnel will generally become angry, disenchanted, or disgusted with SCP-056 after several conversations, though they will try to speak with it again if possible.
SCP-056 was discovered while it was working for the clothing design company █████ █ █████, after an unusual number of homicides, suicides, and mental breakdowns among its employees. When a Foundation recovery team attempted to detain it, their actions provoked it to change into what appeared to be [DATA EXPUNGED] resulting in the deaths of five (5) agents and three (3) civilians in the ensuing violence. A cover story was released about a disgruntled employee bringing a firearm to work and attacking his co-workers, and all witnesses were issued Class C amnestics after debriefing.
2nd project: "Friendly Fluorine"
Class: Euclid
Containment procedures: etc here
Description: SCP-2157 is a quantity of sentient fluorine, weighing 78.4 grams. At room temperature, SCP-2157 usually presents as a semi-transparent cloud of yellow dust, in an oblong shape roughly 0.5 meters across.
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Item #: SCP-2974
by user ciaranhappy
"The Unseeable Sear"
Object Class: Euclid
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-2974 is to be in a 11 by 8 by 11 meter glass box that is inside a larger metal casing box that peaple step into to observe, in the event of a containment breach., The glass and metal boxes have deadly laser systems killing anything that may tries to escape if said thing can die. The metal box also has (REDACTED) gatling gun mounted on the corners to keep SCP-2974 from escaping
Description: SCP-2974 is practically impossible to describe, as we cant see it. its also know as the "Unseeable Seer" We don't know why, we were starting to run out of names so we just picked a random one. The thing has no signature of any kind, so we cant see it in any way, but we can touch it, based on feeling it, we can make a estimation that it resembles a mid 17th century (REDACTED), with 2 masts, both with two topsails.
Discovery: SCP-2974 was found when a farmer, looking for a new place to make a well, was walking into what he called an invisible wall, we removed it immediately.
Additional Information: When within 26 (REDACTED) from SCP-2974, all life forms seem to, lose their minds and go berserk and rip each others heads of, plants just, explode, we don't wanna know what happens to bacteria. But we had to check, turns out bacteria just, grow spikes of some sort all over them.
During the containment breach we had, SCP-2974 was reported "Literally no longer physically there" so we went looking for it, we found a empty wooden room with mouths, and we bumped into SCP-2974 invisible shape when walking.
After researching the room, we found it was sentient, it could kill, but it ate insects, a human would not fit in its mouths. This room has been called SCP-2974-A
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OK COLLAPSIBLE-COLLAPSIBLE TEST
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