Amor Pati (Love to Suffer) - SCP Foundation

"I ordered the lobster bisque. Considering the car crash, I suppose we can call this my second mistake."

Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.1

Item of Interest: Document 0023

Associated With: PoI #0023/01, Dr. Annabelle Kraken, INK0023

Mastercopy Location: Document 0023 is to be stored in a bulletproof glass case in the second floor observation wing of the Pataphysics Department. The case is to remain locked at all times, in accordance with standard object containment protocols. Document 0023 is available to all Pataphysics personnel with appropriate clearance, should they wish to learn about it. Document 0023 is not itself an anomalous item, and poses no threat to researchers.

Following acquisition of Document 0023, Enkidu.aic has been programmed to report any Inciting Events similar to INK0023 to Pataphysics Site Head P. Panagiotopolous.

Description: INK0023 is the designation for a Multiversal Narritivistic Inciting Event2 shared by Level 4 Researcher Dr. Annabelle Kraken and Person of Interest #0023/01 (legal name O█████ ████████).

INK0023 occurred on 8/13/201█ at approximately 1500 hours, and lasted one minute and thirty-four (34) seconds. During this time, Dr. Kraken and PoI #0023/01 simultaneously performed the following actions in the following order:

Entered the right turn lane on the corner of █████ █████ Road and ███████ ████ Circle in ████████, Arizona, USA. Both subjects were driving a 2006 Toyota Avalon, painted dark green.

Performed the turn without checking the opposite lane for traffic.

Upon looking in the rearview mirror, noticed a vehicle about to hit her/them.

Swerved to the right to avoid impact.

Drove onto the sidewalk and made contact with a fire hydrant, causing irreparable damage to the vehicle.

Ceased movement and cut the engine, removing the keys.

Stayed in the vehicle for 23 seconds.

Exited vehicle, complaining verbally to self of chest pain.

As a result of INK0023, PoI #0023/01 developed anomalous cognitive functions that caused the spontaneous trigger of false sensory stimuli. These “hallucinations” mimicked the properties and anomalous functions of various SCP objects, seemingly at random.3 Why INK0023 had this effect on its subjects is under investigation. The nature of Multiversal Narritivistic Inciting Events, and INKs in general, is currently poorly understood.

PoI #0023/01 began writing Document 0023 approximately five years after the conclusion of INK0023. From its contents, it has been determined that PoI #0023/01’s native reality was swn-001. Interestingly, PoI #0023/01 herself was not a swn-001-1 entity, and had no knowledge of the Foundation prior to INK0023.

+ Access File: Document 0023

Close File

The following is an abridged version of Document 0023. An effort has been made to document all known anomalies that PoI #0023/01 references herein. Please submit any corrections to Site Head P. Panagiotopolous. All sensitive data, cognitohazardous phrases, and possible memetic triggers have been removed from Document 0023.

03/18/201█

Just finished moving back in to my parent’s. Mom is serving soup tonight. Of course. That’s my luck for you.

Threw the last journal out. Burned it, actually. Kept it longer than I should have. I didn’t write much in there, but on the back pages I tried to draw that girl who can only half-finish stuff.4 Guess I remembered that one better than I thought because I drew her perfectly. I got her mopey expression down exactly how it was in the dream; all sad, her lids drooping, but tense, too, overwhelmed with fear. Well, I know the feeling.

When the hallucinations weren’t keeping me up, I’d instead be kept up imagining her horrible sad eyes frowning at me underneath the journal cover. It got so bad that I started imagining her hand crawling out from under the pages in the dark. Maybe that really did happen, I don’t know.

Anyway, yeah. Burned it. At the roast at A████’s house. When everyone went inside to get the sacrificial hot dog, I stayed out, knelt by the flames and slipped the journal through the grate. I watched Zena’s hand twist in the flames as she burned. Or did I? Or did she?

A████ would be upset if he knew. Actually, no, he probably wouldn’t see the significance of it. Not immediately. But it would dawn on him slowly, like a blood red sun rising,5 and with a suddenness that he can’t quite comprehend, his entire body would dissolve into dread and fear and confusion (and red goo).

I know that for the same reason I know about the goo: I’ve seen it before.

I didn’t do a lot of writing in the last journal. But it was around that time that I think A████ finally started believing me.

I was at his place. I started throwing up again. It came on quick this time, because I wasn’t expecting it — he’d put on a loud, cheesy action movie in another language. That was usually enough to keep my attention, because I had to focus to read the subtitles. Unless, of course, something happened in the movie to remind me of the Foundation. Then the hell would start afresh. This was one of those nights.

The movie was some mystifying interbreed between “French arthouse” and “Fast and Furious.” We were about halfway through, this overblown car chase scene at the end of act two. Suddenly one of the cars gets flipped on its side and we’re treated to a half-second shot of the driver’s body scraping along the pavement through the open window. They cut away to an overhead of a long red streak on the pavement.

Basic stuff, but that’s all it takes. Immediately I’m thinking about the nail.6 That D-Class with his torso 160 meters away from the rest of it. I put my hands over my face for a second and then look back at the TV. I tell myself I’m not going to look at the rest of the room.

But when I look up at the TV again, it’s got a big glob of congealed blood over it. So.

The floor beneath me has been covered in gore. All of A████’s shit, covered in blood and bits of organ. But it’s not a sea of it. Somehow worse, it’s in a pattern. A long, mostly-straight line, a streak of blood and viscera, crossing from the front door, down the hall, over the couch, across the TV, and right to where I’m sitting.

The pain always comes second. Which is the worst part. If it came first, I would have time to actualize it — but my body knows what’s happening isn’t real. My pain receptors don’t get activated until I see it, or smell it, or taste it first. Then the rest kicks in, trying to resolve an internalized paradox.

Pretty soon I’m on the floor screaming something about my kidney. A████ comes in from the kitchen with a spatula and a lot of panic. Somehow we end up in the bathroom.

“What is it? What is it?” he keeps saying, like he does every time.

“The… nail… on my shadow. It's, hrrk—” I hover over the toilet, on my knees. We haven’t eaten yet. There’s nothing there. I don’t eat much these days, anyway. There’s usually nothing there.

He holds my hair while I dry heave. With his free hand, he looks up the object on his phone. “Nail shadow SCP” is more than enough for Google to figure this one out.

“Jesus,” he says, reading. His tone is more derisive than disturbed. “So, you’re seeing…?”

“The D-Class… who walked away from it before sunrise,” I mumble into the bowl. “He gets… pulled—” I stop, forcing down another gag. Talking about it makes the hallucinations more intense. “My kidney is on the coffee table,” I finish lamely.

A████’s quiet for an indecisive moment. Processing. I get that this is hard for him too, but I wish I didn’t have to be so patient all the time.

“O█████, you have to get on top of this,” he says finally. “There’s nothing out there. I am literally looking right at you and you’re fine. You’re just throwing up. There’s no wounds. There’s no road rash. There’s definitely no kidneys in the living room. You’re imagining it.”

I don’t respond because I’m trying not to cry. Then I look at him and I say:

“No, I’m not. I know it’s not real to you. And I guess it isn’t real to my body, because if I’d actually been dragged several miles across the surface of the earth then I wouldn’t be fucking talking to you, would I. But it’s real to me. I see it, smell it, taste it, and hear it… I even dream it sometimes. And I certainly feel it.” We stare at each other a moment. I gesture. “My puke is real, isn’t it? My tears? My suffering is real.”

Or something like that. I don’t know. I probably said something much stupider in the moment. But whatever it was, it got through to A████. He stared at me with his eyes all wide and funny, like he wasn’t believing what he was seeing.

And the moment he did, his face started dissolving. Like I was saying earlier. Dissolving under the weight of a red-hot impossibility.

I’m going to try writing more in this journal, I think. Enough with the drawings.

3/19/201█

Saw my therapist today. Most of our exchanges go like this:

Him: “Are you still writing?”

Me: “Yes.”

Him: “Is the writing still helping?”

Me: “Yes.”

Him: “That’s great news, O█████!”

Me: “But it’s not going away. The episodes are getting more frequent.”

Him, upbeat (forced): “We may want to look into a prescription. I can get you in contact with a psychiatrist who—”

Me, patient (forced): “They gave me medication at the asylum. Three different drugs for schizophrenia and eight for anxiety. None of them did anything.”

Him: “Realistically, we don’t have any other ways of treating you.”

He thinks he knows everything. Which is how he reasons that my “special case” doesn’t actually exist. According to him, I’m just a schizophrenic gone wild.

I guess he’s technically right.

I know the Foundation doesn’t really exist. Hell, I’ve literally had conversations with some of the people who wrote these stories. It’s a website on the internet where people come up with glorified creepypastas. That’s it. That’s all it is. I’m just a paranoid barely-adult terrified of the shadows in her doorway, throwing up over a fear of the unreal, unable to sleep because of imagined monsters. That’s it. That’s all it is.

Except that’s not all it is. Except it’s so much more than that and it always has been. Except if it really was that simple I would have gotten over it a long time ago. Except that, the first time I dared to share what I was going through, at a craft fair at the armory, to some teen kid who’d just bought a knitted scarf from my fourth-grade teacher, I muttered quietly to him “Sometimes when I open a door, I walk into this dirty steel room with a statue in the corner”; and he looked up at me, sort of tilted his head, kind of squinted, like I’d offended him, and finally said, “You mean SCP-173?”7

It’s one thing to be traumatized. It’s another thing entirely to be traumatized by someone else’s form of entertainment.

This thing has been going on since 2007. All by itself. When that kid at the craft fair gave a name — a number — to one of my tormentors, I misunderstood him at first. I assumed, surely, he was talking about something real. Because I’d been experiencing it in my head for months at that point, so I knew it wasn’t fake. The Foundation was a real place. The boy had simply shown me how to find it.

I didn’t talk to anyone back then. I was too scared. I was more than a few articles in before I noticed the discussion posts; the little upvote box in the corner. It wasn’t real after all. By that point I just felt lonely.

When I went to look up the infamous rebar peanut for the first time, I hesitated a little. If only I’d listened to that hesitation. If only I hadn’t looked.

3/20/201█

No episodes today. Rare occurrence these days.

I remember back in 201█, after the car crash, when all this first started. Back then, it was almost unnoticeable. I would only get it in flashes: very brief, very vague, and very inconsistent. Usually it would only feature one of my senses, too. The smell of blood at a restaurant. The echo of a bird call warping into the off-kilter ping of a reality anchor. Opening the door to my bedroom only to walk into an endless control tower.8

(That last one made for a particularly noteworthy episode. The first time it happened, it was a vision that only lasted a few seconds. But it happened again, about two years ago. I trapped myself in my room for 29 hours. When A████ finally figured out how to pick the lock on the front door, he found me collapsed with a makeshift shank and the ceiling covered in tape. The only coherent phrases I could muster were “it wouldn’t stop knocking” and “the wind was too strong”.)

But for the most part, just random images. Mostly unidentifiable. Largely meaningless.

I would think about it every now and then. Occasionally I would draw what I’d experienced. Most of the time, I got on with my life. I was in college at the time. And writing, too. Lots of writing. I was so focused on my work. Nothing else mattered.

Not to mention, none of it meant anything to me. I didn’t know what the Foundation was back then; I had no reason to believe any of these hallucinations were any different from the “hallucinations” I have daydreaming about my writing. A little more visceral, sure, but I’d just gone through my first-ever car crash. Certainly a bit of weirdness was to be expected.

Then the insomnia kicked in.

The first night it happened was far from being the worst of my life, but it’s up there. It was also my first run-in with the soup.

The roast wasn’t happening that night; A████ forgot to buy more hot dogs. He convinced the rest of us to go to Red Lobster with him. Me, A████, [SENSITIVE INFORMATION REMOVED] They gave us a booth, of course. I sat in the middle because it’s my favorite place to sit. At the center, at the heart, surrounded by everyone else.

I ordered the lobster bisque. Considering the car crash, I suppose we can call this my second mistake.

I really wasn’t even thinking about the food by the time it arrived. Everyone was talking and I’d already chewed my way through a couple bread rolls. I wasn’t even that hungry; but I’d never turned down food before. I don’t think I knew how to. God, if only I could eat like that again.

When I brought the spoon to my lips I was mid-sentence. I didn’t start gagging immediately, though I’m sure it looked like that to the others. I tried to hold it down at first, to resolve what I was tasting as something other than what it was.

Semen. Bloody semen. Little hard knobbly bits of flesh mixed in, sticking to my teeth. And all of it congealed, married into homogeny, sort of syrupy, thick in my throat like lacquer. Somehow, the worst part was how cold it was.

I realized I was about to throw up in front of all my friends. I didn’t have a lot of time to parse this realization before it actually happened.

In the moment, I kept my cool. I told everyone I’d had a nausea spell and I didn’t want to eat anymore. Within five minutes, the tense conversation — the nervous looks in my direction — had faded. All was back to normal. Hell, even I was back to normal. I didn’t dare try the soup again, but my nausea had rapidly disappeared. Like all the other episodes up to this point, it was extremely brief, and very random.

I got a ride home from A████. I actually didn’t think about it at all, if you can believe that. I listened to some music. Wrote a bit. Went to bed. Couldn’t go to bed.

Well, okay, I could go to bed. But I woke up barely an hour later, stirred into consciousness in the dark of my room by the disgusting imagery in my dream. I couldn’t remember any of it, and woke with nothing but a vague sense of unease.

Tried to sleep again. Did, a little, maybe a half hour. Woke up again. The unease had graduated into anxiety.

If I’d ever had sleeping problems, it was oversleeping, not under. With a determined vengeance, I went back to bed after a brief walk to tire myself out. I put on a livestream to help calm myself down. This time, when I woke up again, it was to the sudden onset of a raging fever. Now the anxiety had transformed into paranoia.

I was remembering bits of the dream too. Malformed bodies writhing together, warped into a heaving pink surface. They smelled like the soup tasted. They looked like the soup tasted. I went to the bathroom and threw up and threw up and threw up, for hours. I’d only taken one bite but the taste was back in my mouth. No amount of retching would make it go away.

I’d never been this sick before. In fifth grade, I got food poisoning from a quiche at a school potluck. Within mere minutes of my eating, my vision blurred to the point of blindness. Like those videos where people melt crayons with a hair dryer. Everything was swimming. Lurid, violent color. A few minutes later, I was just retching and retching. The pain was unbelievable and constant. Some little black thing chewing through my insides. Throwing up didn’t alleviate it, the way it normally does when you’re sick.

This was worse than that. It wouldn’t end. The nausea came in waves, but never faded entirely; just plateaued. And I hadn’t eaten, so there was nothing there. My throat flexed up and down with all the force of a piston, torturing itself without end or purpose.

Finally, exhausted, eyes going full Crayola, I called A████. He sat up on the phone with me for the rest of the night. I didn’t sleep. Just laid there in silence. He did the same. Occasionally I would mumble, “Are you awake?”

“Yeah. Still here.” He sounded so tired. But he always answered. He never fell asleep.

Later — a lot later — I figured out what this horrible thing was.9 That was one hell of a night, the first time I read that article. Not only did I hallucinate eating human excreta — it gets worse! But that’s a tedious story. Forget it. I’m not writing that.

I think about that night with A████ a lot these days. At the time, I couldn’t explain to him what was happening; just that I’d had a nightmare and couldn’t sleep. I’d just thrown up in public and refused dinner. I never did stuff like that back then. Despite the lack of explanation, despite the complete absence of any satisfying conclusion, he readily helped me anyway.

What I don’t understand is why he doesn’t do that now. Now that he does have an explanation — I’m hallucinating nightmares from a fictional website — the explanation isn’t good enough. Now that he knows what the problem is, it’s like he doesn’t want to help it anymore. He wants to judge it instead. And it’s not just him, it’s everyone. The therapists and doctors and my parents especially. It’s not real, so therefore I am crazy. That’s all that matters to them. It’s the only thing they can see.

3/21/201█

Who am I?

I am God;

According to the Pataphysics banner.

But I’m not

Because I

Haven’t written a word of that scripture.

3/31/201█

Haven’t written in a while. Something weird happened. Did something weird because of the weird thing.

I had another dream.

I’ve had dreams about Zena. 2599. I dreamed her. The researchers talking to her. The way reality fractaled when she lost control and cried at them. Knowing, without knowing how I knew, without having to prove it, that the vision-breaking offshoots of a reality bender were more than enough to tear holes through the people supervising her. They were afraid, and I watched them sedate her.

The dreams are also how I found out about Sopdet10 and the Jell-O.11 One dream for each. The second one was much worse, given the anomaly — that was one of the bad dreams. I wasn’t hurt, at least, but when I woke up I was miserable and paranoid. Snapped at everyone. Unable to stop thinking about what it had done.

Neither of those are on the website, by the way. I’ve looked. I’ve looked everywhere. They don’t exist. I don’t know why that is.

The best part about the dreams is that they’re dreams. I only remember vague details, and sometimes not even that. Nine times out of ten, I don’t have to wake up full of horrifying images. I just have to deal with whatever feeling the dream imparted. Usually dread. Paranoia. Sometimes disgust. Rarely, very rarely, if I’m lucky: comfort.

But there’s that one out of ten to consider. The dreams I do remember — vividly. On the 21st, after getting down that poem, the one out of ten happened.

Not that I’m complaining, but it was probably the most boring Foundation dream I’ve ever had. It was from the perspective of a senior researcher. A containment breach had just been discovered; most of the dream consisted of an emergency conference between high-ranking Site staff. Yes, that’s right, my subconscious made me sit through a fucking board meeting.

I’m not totally sure what skip it was; they were talking in code the whole meeting, to avoid triggering any cognitohazards. At the beginning, mnestics got passed around — just in case. Apparently, an off-site Unit had gone down. All the data was corrupted, so they had no idea what had actually happened.12 The heads of the board (I don’t think they were O5, I can never tell) were mostly just trying to brief the staff on-site. No one was anticipating any immediate solutions.

Afterwards, the researcher I “was” went out into the hallway. In dreams, you don’t notice details until they’re relevant. I didn’t realize I was dreaming her perspective until she walked away from the meeting hall, down a long white corridor, and ducked into a bathroom.

She didn’t use it. Went to the mirror instead. Adjusted her hair, washed her hands. Kept looking up at the mirror. Adjusted her coat, her ID badge. Paused at the badge. Looked into the mirror as she reclipped it. Twisted to the side so she could get a good look at how it rested on her breast pocket. And I got a good look, too.

It said:

DR. ANNABELLE KRAKEN

RESEARCHER (CLEARANCE LEVEL 4)

Now here comes the weird part. Like I said, she kept looking at the mirror. But she wasn’t looking at her reflection. She was looking at me. I know, without knowing how I know, without having to prove it — I know she saw me.13 She knew I could see her. She knows who I am.

And she wanted me to know who she is, too.

4/1/201█

I know about Pataphysics. I’ve hallucinated it like anything else. The hallucinations don’t follow any sort of pattern or system, at least not in terms of the anomalies. Nothing is off-limits. Tales, SCPs, test logs, joke articles — even a few of the particularly robust author pages. If it’s on the website, it can break my brain. That seems to be the only rule.

The actual triggers are a bit more specific. I just wish those specifications weren’t so easy to achieve.14

I wrote yesterday that I did something weird because of my dream about Kraken. I almost thought I shouldn’t write it down. In case I get in trouble for it somehow. But I need to tell someone, and a piece of paper is a good listener.

I made an account.15

Not… for any reason, really. What could I possibly do? Try to sabotage the website to save my own sanity? There’s already an SCP about that.16 It won’t work. I’m not stupid enough to try.

And anyway… I don’t want to. That probably sounds insane. But it’s true. Those people. They’re happy. Making monsters together, and stuff. Who am I to take that away from them?

After my dream about Kraken, I went and looked her up. But she wasn’t there. Not a trace of the name. I even checked the mainsites for other countries. No Kraken. She doesn’t exist.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Pataphysics Department. In that whole mess about Roget17 they talk about targeting a specific swn01-1 in order to plant an idea. I’m not a swn01-1, but I’m close. Maybe that’s what Kraken was doing. Targeting me.

It’s delusional. The Foundation isn’t real. I know.

But…

Well, it’s just an account, at any rate. A symbolic gesture. Nothing more.

I exist now.

Hello.

4/8/201█

It’s been a weird week. But that’s not saying much. “It’s been a weird week” for a long time now.

Yesterday was the conclusion of a hallucination that lasted for four days. Never had one go that long before.

I don’t really want to write about what happened. I’ll start thinking about it a bunch and that might trigger another one. No… No, that will trigger another one. They’re so frequent at this point, there’s no way it wouldn’t.

Basically, the chickens were there.18 And MalO kept sending photos.19 That should be enough to get the point across.

If I check my phone now, there’ll be nothing there. I haven’t checked yet. I don’t want to see the nothing. You can’t imagine how depressing the nothing is. Maybe I’ll just burn my phone, like I do with the journals. Get a new one. Start over.

No. Can’t afford that. Lost my job last year. I was a secretary at a TV station for a while. Good place to start my life. But the hallucinations had me saying weird things to customers, so they let me go. Ended up at a deli. Refused to get within 30 feet of the toaster.20 They let me go, too.

Now I’m back at my parents because I couldn’t afford to keep my place anymore. At least it’s better than the asylum. I’ve convinced them that I’m lucid enough to take care of myself. But if I don’t get a job, they’re probably going to send me back. And I can’t get a job. So, yeah, they’re going to send me back. Eventually.

Burn this journal, get a new one, start over. Burn this job, get a new one, start over. Burn this life, get a new one, start over.

It’s not a very healthy way to live.

But I don’t have much choice these days.

What’s funny is… I’m writing all this depressing shit, but since that dream with Kraken… I don’t know, it’s like I’m detached from it. For four days I hid in my room while my phone kept buzzing with images that didn’t exist and my bed was crowded with chicken monsters that also didn’t exist. And I… didn’t really care. I sort of just… ignored it. Each time I could smell one of those disgusting things, or each time I got a shot of MalO’s skullface in my peripherals, I would think of Kraken. I would think of her living in a world where this stuff actually does exist. A world where it could physically stand in front of you and touch you. A world where it could fill your biology with contaminates and viruses and cognitohazards. A world where it could reach inside of your body, or your mind even, and rewrite it with a thought. A world where at any moment, in an instant, you could be killed — and not because you did something wrong, no, but because you did something normal; you bought a toaster, you went upstairs, you referred to something by name, you fucking blinked. That’s it. That’s all it takes. You’re dead.

I guess real life is sort of like that, too. You can die doing benign shit. When someone dies, it never makes sense. It always feels like a random, senseless, unpredictable, illogical, unfair accident.

Like my car accident was. Like that sleepless night with A████ was.

Maybe that’s why the website works. The monsters aren’t real; they’re metaphors for different fears. Fear of the random, senseless, unpredictable, illogical, and unfair. Fear of the violent, cruel, sadistic, gory, and painful. Fear of the dark, endless, encroaching, inevitable, and predestined. Fear of fear. That’s the one I have. Fear of fear.

I am afraid of being afraid.

When I was a kid, people would ask me what I was afraid of. Heights? No. The dark? Not really. Bugs? Meh. Death? Only as much as anyone else.

I could never give a good answer to that question. I didn’t grow up on horror movies like most kids. My mom hates anything with gore or violence. So we would never watch stuff like that. The first “scary movie” I saw was Nightmare Before Christmas; they were playing it on TV during Halloween when I was seven or so. I thought it was a horror movie. I thought I would get in trouble for watching it. That’s how detached I was.

When I started watching it, for what must have been one of the first times in my life, I felt afraid. Properly. Afraid of getting caught, but also… afraid of what might show up on the screen. The longer the movie went on without any blood or jumpscares, the more afraid I became. Anticipating what I falsely believed to be the inevitable. Unsure of how it would make me feel. Unsure of how seeing it might change me.

I didn’t finish watching it. In hindsight, maybe we can call that my first mistake.

I’m still deathly afraid of jumpscares. It’s so childish. But I won’t play games that have them. I fast-forward past them in YouTube videos. I let my fear seize me up.

And I’m afraid of the SCP Foundation, too.

There. That’s what I came here to say. I AM AFRAID OF THE SCP FOUNDATION. I am mollified by it. It haunts me. But no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try — no matter how many journals I burn or friends I tell “I’m never reading it again” — no matter what I do, I can’t escape it. Because it’s inside of me. It’s in my dreams and my heart. It’s a part of me. Just like my fear is.

The following entry is listed immediately after the previous one in the original document.

10/10/20██

Hello, old friend. We haven’t talked in a long time. It’s because last time, I finally got what I needed out of you.

But you didn’t get what you needed out of me. The end of the story.

I’ve been doing a lot of research since my last entry. I’ve read all sorts of things on the site. One article in particular stood out. I’ll get to that in a minute.

You’re likely wondering about the hallucinations. They haven’t gone away. They’ve gotten much worse. Actually, they don’t stop now.

This afternoon, for example, I was walking to the baseball field, and there was a man hunched over at the drinking fountain. As I walked towards him his body suddenly bloated comically, inflating like a fleshy pink balloon, and held its shape for just a moment before exploding in a shower of red viscera.

That’s not from a skip, I don’t think. The images are so dense that I can’t even identify the source material anymore.

But it was fine. I didn’t react. I kept my poker face. I stepped back to avoid the curtain of red. And then I kept walking, shoes squishing.

I’m okay, I told myself. I’m fine. I just saw something scary. It’s over now.

And somehow, that worked.

When I turned around again, there he was, drinking his water.

This stuff happens constantly now. I keep it down. Background noise. It’s hard, but I do it. Because I have a reason to. I have a goal.

One SCP I read was about a person like me, who tries to get into their reality.21 Obviously it goes horrifically wrong. This is the SCP Foundation. There are no happy endings.

Which means mine can’t be, either.

Anyway, he does a ritual. Thaumaturgical symbols and all that. It’s kept vague, but after so many years of following along at home, it’s not hard to put together the missing pieces. I think I’ve replicated it. Or at least, the instructions for it.

Not for myself, I should clarify. For this journal. This isn’t about saving me from my torment — it’s about ending it. Plus, they should know. In baseline. They should know what happened to me. They should know, once and for all, that swn01 isn’t full of their “Gods” enacting torment on the Foundation from afar — if anything, it’s the opposite. They’re our Gods. They live inside our heads and give us the images we write into existence. They orchestrate the pieces of the grand design of their universe, and we are little more than pawns in the act. And they hurt us. So much. Just as much as we’ve hurt them.

It should go without saying that I’m probably about to die.

I’m sitting, now, in a church parking lot just outside my neighborhood. It’s night. The pavement is cool and slightly pliant from yesterday’s rain; the chalk symbols stick well. I feel that what needs to happen is what’s going to happen. In fact, it feels like it’s already happened.

The ritual requires a written component — which stands to reason, given the objective. The journal is both the object I am trying to deliver, and the engine that will power its delivery.

For the sake of the thaumaturgy, the contents had to be particular and discerning. Which I hope was obvious. I mean, A████? Living in Arizona? Come on, they would never. Not after what I did when we were dating. And if I put any of their real information, like their name or their gender, I risked involving them in the spell.22 I just needed a character to bounce dialogue off of. But the important bits all really happened, of course. The car crash. The dream with Kraken. The nightmares. The insomnia. The violent illnesses. And that night when A████ stayed up with me. It was just on Discord instead.

If you’re mad, I don’t know why. This is how stories work. To paint the whole picture, to create a scene, some details need to be bent. Moments need to be dramaticized. Pregnant pauses need to be added. The timeline of events needs to make sense. No story, reality or otherwise, can perfectly fit these parameters — there must always be some level of adjustment.

In preparing the ritual, I was thinking about this a lot. Whether or not I should be faulted for making changes. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what I was doing was perfectly natural. I’m making an adaptation, after all. I’m taking something that happened to me in real life and adapting it for the Foundation. And as everyone knows, there is no such thing as an adaptation that is a perfect one-to-one with the original. Because every medium has its own vices and limitations. The story must be structured to respect those limitations; if you tried to adapt something exactly to the parameters of the source material, it would be bad. It wouldn’t be tailored to the new medium.

Maybe this place, swn01, the one we call reality — maybe it’s just another medium. Another way to tell a story. It has the appearance of reality, which gives it authority… but then again, don’t most stories have the appearance of reality? You believed this one, after all, up until I told you not to. I believed the Foundation, up until I noticed the rating box. Verisimilitude. Maybe swn01 is nothing more than a masterclass in verisimilitude.

“Just as you have swept through me. Just as I now sweep through you.”

I suppose I ought to finish this up now. I’m done drawing the circles, and I made sure not to talk while I did it. I just need to put the journal in the center.

Oh, one more thing, before I go. Those articles I dreamed, that I couldn’t find on the site? Kraken? Turns out, not much of a mystery there.

They simply haven’t been written yet.

Addendum: As of 12 Jan 2025 01:24, POI #0023/01’s status remains unknown.

Footnotes

1. Danielewski, M. Z. (2000). House of Leaves (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

2. An anomalous pataphysical phenomenon in which the same series of events happen in the same time and place, but in two separate narrative constructs.

3. Similarly, Dr. Kraken began experiencing false sensory stimuli of material originating from PoI #0023/01’s reality construct; but due to the relatively benign nature of PoI #0023/01’s reality, Dr. Kraken was not aware of the anomaly.

4. SCP-2599.

5. SCP-███.

6. SCP-272.

7. SCP-173.

8. SCP-3333.

9. SCP-835.

10. Reference unknown.

11. Reference unknown.

12. SCP-3005.

13. Dr. Kraken has been thoroughly interviewed regarding her involvement. There is no reason to believe POI #0023/01's statements regarding this interaction.

14. Based on document analysis, it is believed that PoI #0023/01’s hallucinations could be activated by the following non-exhaustive list of triggers: 1) thinking about the SCP Foundation; 2) viewing the fictional SCP Foundation “database”; 3) overhearing, or participating in, conversation about the SCP Foundation; 4) viewing any image that is also hosted on the fictional “database,” regardless of the actual location of the image upon viewing; 5) seeing the acronym “SCP” in a context that is not relevant to the SCP Foundation; 6) reenacting the events of INK0023; 7) being in the general proximity of the location where INK0023 took place; 8) viewing, entering, or talking about any vehicle of the same model that was used during INK0023; 9) taking any form of medication orally; 10) experiencing a sudden mood whiplash, regardless of whether the change is negative or positive; 11) experiencing a skipped heart beat, due to a startling or unexpected stimuli; 12) experiencing a feeling of dread and/or panic; 13) seeing any human excreta (blood, saliva, semen, sweat, stool, etc.), esp. in the context of an injury or accident; 14) seeing any non-human excreta (as above), esp. in the context of concurrent hallucinations; and, 15) the most frequent trigger, attempting to write an SCP.

15. Identified as Deadcanons.

16. SCP-3309.

17. SCP-3500.

18. SCP-3199.

19. SCP-1471.

20. SCP-426.

21. SCP-2758.

22. Records indicate that “A████” refers to █████████ ████, [SENSITIVE INFORMATION REMOVED] who has lived in ██████████, Massachusetts their entire life. While they have made several verifiable trips to the Arizona area, they do not live there. Furthermore, records reveal that their [SENSITIVE INFORMATION REMOVED]