A Hymn For Pandora - SCP Foundation

by Nagiros

Greetings, Site-17 personnel.

The Foundation has recently undergone a minor adjustment to its informational security procedure. Although some of you may find the revelations contained in this memo disquieting, I promise you that they will better facilitate a smoothly-operating Foundation.

The Foundation was, initially, a band of idealistic young men who came together to discover the mysteries the universe had swept under the rug. Their discoveries, at first, were limited to trivial oddities: slugs which excreted ranch dressing, probability-defying coins, living pencils… but then, they began to discover monsters. Abominations that burned through metal and flesh, predators neither bullet nor missile could harm, ancient beings trapped for millennia in earth and stone. Soon, the malignant anomalies outnumbered the innocuous, and the Foundation's nature began to slowly warp.

The men in charge grew harder, colder. Casualties became only a number on paper and mercenaries were contracted, prior to the formation of any true Mobile Task Force. The O5s, nowadays, will not tell you about when anomalies were the benign and the playful; I don't think any of us can blame them for that omission.

The news that I have been tasked with delivering, however, extends further than that small, white lie. The Foundation is built on lies.

Site-19 currently houses an anomaly cataloged as SCP-682, who has unintentionally formed a remarkable cult of personality. The personnel at Site-19 refer to it as the Hard-to-Destroy Reptile, and converse about containment failures as though they were installments in an on-going, serialized drama. Ask any junior researcher positioned there and they will tell you, almost pridefully, that SCP-682 is one of, if not the most, dangerous anomaly the Foundation has ever contained.

They are wrong.

I have read reports on uncontainable things which would crush the Reptile into dust beneath their otherworldly heels with casual disdain. The Reptile is remarkable in its resilience but utterly laughable in its lethality.

I am writing this today because I wish to show you all the truth. My petitions to the Overseers have been answered; no longer will we hide these uncontainable gods behind clearance levels and memetic hazards. Junior researchers, you will now find a multitude of entry slots on the SCiPNET database open to you. So long as its documentation does not reveal confidential information about the Foundation and its personnel, we see no more reason to hide them from you.

When the whole of the anomalous catalog lays open to you — or at least as much as a Site Director can view — a conclusion stands out starkly from the screaming chaos: that if there is a supreme divinity, he is crueler than any of us can imagine, or has been placed in charge of a universe created by the Evil itself. That evil is propagating at a rate faster than we could ever feasibly contain. Our best projections have asserted that the probability of us escaping the twenty-first century without a massive anomalous event exposing the supernatural to the general public is next to zero. Faced with the knowledge that a malevolent god rules our universe and has beset us with his agents of famine, plague, and terror, it is easy to despair. It is easy to forget who we are. It is easy to forget what we must do.

There exists a universe, somewhere, inhabited by the cadavers of titanic monsters, piled on top of schools with classes who all graduated in 1976, piled on top of Scarlet bones and waste. And one day soon, humanity will approach a monument of smoldering, red-flecked ash, and read aloud the words of an author long deceased.

"Look around you, mortal men, and see the land of gods, and weep. We were once the strange and the disquieting, the horrific and the dead. We were anomalies, but anomalies no more."

We have chained the indestructible lizard. We have kept at bay cosmic horrors for centuries, ten at a time and all eager to cleave our world in twain. We have cheated Time, we have defeated Death, we have protected the world from the unknown, and we have not failed in all this time. We have not merely stared into an abyss but plunged headlong into it, armed to the teeth to fight whatever lies at the bottom. Do you think a god can stop us? Do you think that anyone can stop us?

We are the Foundation. We will secure, we will contain, and we will protect above all else; we are the Foundation, and our mission is unstoppable.

- Dr. Weather, Director of Site-17