Can You Feel The Sun? - SCP Foundation

Alzin Cdag

Can You Feel The Sun?

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Part 1

All That Copper, Glowing Fine

Part 3

CONTENT WARNING: An animation which may cause motion sickness. Critters: Kilerpoyo, Sound Chaser. Rainbow Text colors based on https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/not-my-circus-not-my-monkeys by DrChandra and LordStonefish. Snow-like animation modified from https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/theme:xmas, for which credit goes to Dc_Yerko, which was adapted by stormbreath, and the snow code itself adapted by EstrellaYoshte from https://github.com/elena-in-code/Css-Snow-Fall-Animation. Based on characters by tiredsn0w, Gabriel Jade, djkaktus, Dmatix, Metaphysician, MontagueETC, DrChandra, whoever came up with Percival Darke (Randomini, perhaps?), SoullessSingularity, PennywiseTheClown, snuggly face, interpretations of the Masked Lords by DrGooday in their work https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/poetic-records-of-the-alagaddan-lords, and interpretations of Grabnok from margssentif in their work https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/hopping-through-worlds.

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F.A.Q.

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The Doctor

I awoke in a lavender-scented bed, which was odd, because I didn't remember going to sleep. Moments later I remembered the means by which I had been transported, the ends for which the Alagaddans meant to use me, and, not least of my recollections at that moment, the person from whom I had been snatched.

I tore open the bed-curtains and found myself confronted by three tall, masked figures, each presenting a very different visage.

"How good it is to see all four Lords back in the city!" sighed the figure in the yellow mask, who was clad in marching band uniform. He punctuated his words with exaggerated operatic gestures. "At last we can stop our squabbling over who gets to oversee Dyo's share of the slave labor."

"Oh, right," giggled the one in the red mask, though he stood in a contemplative position, peering at a skull in his hand. "I told the White Lord here to tell you, but I guess she was too la- I mean, too busy being diligent- to tell you."

"Tell me what?"

"Oh, sorry," said the figure in the white mask, who was draping herself over a sofa. Her clothes looked uncommonly like pajamas. "Just… slipped my mind. No big deal."

"What did? What happened to all those- all that valuable labor?"

"Oh, I killed them all," laughed the one in red. "Sent them all to their mortal destinies. Former kings, former paupers… all leveled by the great equalizer. Isn't it just grand? They had families and loved ones who they never got to say goodbye to…" He made a sound like he was trying to stifle a heavy sob under a laugh.

"Best solution, I didn't resist," said the one in white. "Easiest way to end the squabble. We can always get more, now that there's four of us again…"

And they turned to me as one, and began to break into song.

"We're the Lords of Alagadda, and we're taking you to task

For to oversee our fearsome deeds, each of us needs a mask

You may think that you are covered with that beak upon your face

But a mask is more than physical; a lie that you embrace.

Black and white, yellow, red

We fill the land with dread."

"I'm the Ruddy Lord with the Mirthful Mask disguising deeper sorrow,"

"I'm the White Lady with the Diligent Mask- can we do this all tomorrow?"

" I'm the Yellow Lord with the Odious Mask-"

"That's enough from you, nobody asked!"

"But the lie sticks well in this land of hell"

"When you've felt the truth behind lie's cast spell…."

"So tell us, Surgeon," said the White Lord, "Do you have the emotional capacity to play the role of an Anguished Lord?"

I stood in silence, dumbfounded by this whole display. I didn't know what the right answer was here. I didn't want to be their Anguished Lord, but I was afraid of what means they might try to make me so.

The Red Lord's eye gleamed behind the mask. "No, I don't think he does," he said. "I am familiar with anguish. It requires a shattering of certain fundamental beliefs, and my read on this one is that he has gone mad rather than face that."

And they locked arms with each other as they began a three-Lord kick line, whose geometry crossing into higher dimensions began to give me motion sickness.

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”Welcome, fool, to Alagadd, You are the new Black Lord.”

”Your mask’s not yet an Anguished Mask, on this we’re in accord.”

”To make it so, we’ll have to take more than you can afford:”

So we'll take you from your madness into woe.

For the Death of Dỳo,

We will pluck you from your madness into woe.”

The root of all your character is curing all the sick

Malpractice of six hundred years, it's never seemed to stick

Yet Pestilence has never been anything but a trick,

So we'll show you all the error of your ways.

Take it weeks or days,

We will show you all the error of your ways.

No. They wouldn’t. They couldn’t!

The one constant in my life is that I stood against the Great Dying. Imprisonment, torture, being deprived of test subjects, and the occasional pangs of my own conscience; all of these were bearable because I knew I was doing right. From the moment I climbed from the Barrow, I had toiled against all that worked woe on the living and the dead. And would these Masked Lords have me believing all had been for naught?

No. I refused to break. The Pestilence was real, damn them! It had diagnosable symptoms, a whole constellation of them! The first sign was…

Was…

Oh, if I had my notebook with me, I could prove myself. It was all written down in there. Memory is fickle and foggy, but written notes are concrete! I mentally staked my claim: I would not let them move me from my beliefs until such time as I could verify my basis for them in the first place.

And then the masked faces exchanged glances. I believe they did have their icy tendrils in my mind, because the next thing they said chilled me to the bone:

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”Then we’ll send a servant to collect your book.

So you can look,

We will send a servant to retrieve your book.

The Companion

“Alagadda, you say?” said the Anesthesiologist. “That’s bad.”

We were in the Doctor’s old quarters, as the Anesthesiologist had wanted to find some baseline on the Doctor’s current mental state.

“Why is it bad?” I asked. “The Ambassador said he had inherited a Lordship there. Surely even if it’s a bad place, it’s better to rule there than to be ruled, right?”

The Anesthesiologist shook his head. “Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works there,” he said. “The King of Alagadda, for instance, suffers more than anyone else in existence.”

He turned to me. “Alagadda is the place where truth goes to die, a place created to neutralize the malignant tumors on the Wanderers' Library. It borders the Nevermeant, the lands of complete lies, where Pattern Screamers dwell, and sometimes they bleed into the city. The higher up on the totem pole you are, the more it kills your truest nature, until only masks remain of the Lords and their god is nothing but a god-shaped hole in existence. And even he has to be put into immense pain to generate enough residual true feelings to continue existing.”

“That does sound bad,” I said. “So what do you intend to do about it?”

“Me?” asked the Anesthesiologist. It was odd seeing one of his kind having any sort of facial expression, so it was doubly unnerving to see his face go through concern, shrewdness, sadness, and acceptance. “Nothing.”

“But he is your brother! Does that mean nothing to you?”

“It means much,” said he, “But my brother is old enough now to take care of himself. He set his path long ago, no matter how much we tried to dissuade him from it.” He sighed. “’Do no harm’. The permission of the patient is critical to our work. But he insisted on ‘curing’ people who had no desire to be thus cured, innocent people who deserved not his touch of death. I tried to save him, I tried to make him see, but no. He would not listen.” He shrugged. “Part of life is learning to let go of the people you can’t save.”

“You’re despicable,” I snarled.

“So then, the question is: what are you going to do about it?” His eyes were shrewd now, as he watched me carefully.

“Me?”

“Certainly. You were closest to him when he was taken. If brothers have a closeness, do not lovers, also? What decision will you make?”

And a static filled my brain as I thought about his question.

The choice, seemingly so simple, was the most difficult of my life.

Up until now, I had lived by the decisions of others. Authorities told me to kill, and I killed till I could no longer stand it. Somewhat less direct authorities told me to sacrifice myself to the rebellion, and I martyred myself upon that cause. The Foundation had squelched all my breach attempts, and though the Doctor had cared for my needs like no other, he was still the one calling the shots in our various dimensional and planetary moves. I had never had a real chance at autonomy before.

I turned away from the Anesthesiologist, to get away from his burning eyes.

What, ultimately, did I want? I was back on my home planet, dwelling with the best people who lived there. I had access to my home gravity, and I was finally starting to return to a healthy weight. I was healthier than I had ever been in my life, and I had a chance to make friends with whom I could speak my real mind.

And all of this was thanks to the Doctor…

“No!” said the Anesthesiologist when I voiced my thoughts. “If you’re going to act, don’t do it out of gratitude. Do it out of what is best for your future! Would you return to the Foundation’s imprisonment, out of gratitude for saving your life from the crash landing?”

So I thought more. Was the Doctor really the best for my future?

My heart said Yea. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t do anything to save the man I loved. He understood me best; he knew what it was to have killed, and the trauma therein. We had chemistry together.

My brain said Nay. I acknowledged that I had been using my relationship with the Doctor as a crutch, an excuse not to make more friends among the Unhumans and the rebels. Any relationship could grow over time to a similar level of understanding, given the time and the experience together.

So my heart and brain stood opposed. Parliamentary deadlock.

Fortunately, I had twice as many hearts as brains, so that the motion passed with a resounding Yea.

“Good!” said the Anesthesiologist, clapping his hands together. “I will assist you.”

“But you said…”

“Not on his account,” said the Anesthesiologist, “I just can’t stand to have another life ruined at my brother’s hand. I can’t save him, but I can try to save you.”

“That’s… wonderful to hear,” I forced, despite my silent indignation at the implication. “So what’s our first step?”

“No, I’m only helping you,” said the Anesthesiologist. “You come up with the plan.”

“You’re already making me regret having you on board,” I said.

“Good! That means you’re thinking and feeling more than you would if I solved everything for you,” the Anesthesiologist said. “I am so tired of making people emotionally numb. Numbness doesn’t solve anything.”

I passed over the remark and looked around the room. “We need some way to get to Alagadda,” I said, after an interim of a few minutes. “But how do we do that?” I looked at the Anesthesiologist. “How do people usually get there, anyway?”

“Well,” he replied, “Usually through some sort of interdimensional door. I know there’s at least two on Earth, and one in the Wanderers' Library…”

“Hmm. Then how do we get to the Wanderers' Library from here?”

“We’d need to find another interdimensional door…”

“Lots of interdimensional doors,” I sighed. My eyes alighted on the Doctor’s bag. “Well, that bag always seems to have whatever tools the Doctor needs, regardless of physical size; maybe there’s an interdimensional portal through there to the Wanderers' Hospital or something. Is that a thing?”

“Of course not,” scoffed the Anesthesiologist. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s all the Wanderers' Fire Station can do to protect the Library and the Wanderers' Public Works Department.”

“I didn’t know there was a Wanderers' Public Works Department,” I said.

“Of course there is. Who do you think fixes the potholes in all the Ways?”

“Hmm. Maybe if we destroy the bag, it will create a rift in space that will summon those folks, so we can hitch a ride off of them to the Library?”

“It’s worth a shot,” admitted the Anesthesiologist. “But we’d have to use the proper ritual to even render them visible in the area.”

“Do you know such a ritual?”

“Of course. The Children of the Barrow know many ways to sense living beings near us, who might need curing.” It was odd; I could tell he was using a lowercase ‘c’ in the word ‘curing’. I missed the Doctor… “Give me a week and I can have it set up.”

“All right,” I said. “I’m going to start clearing out the bag, so that we don’t lose any of his stuff when we destroy it.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” said the Anesthesiologist. “I don’t want your medical inexperience to ruin any valuable equipment.”

So we both climbed into the bag and began tossing everything out into the room.

We had been at it for several hours when we heard a sound like a thousand flatulent camels knocking over flaming theramins.

“What was that?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” whispered the Anesthesiologist. “But I think our timetable just got moved up by about a few weeks.”

I started to peek above the lip of the bag, when the Anesthesiologist pulled me back down. He handed me an endoscope. I looked through it and saw something crawling through the room.

It was a fifteen-meter long worm made of corpses, and it was searching the room for something.

I handed the endoscope back to the Anesthesiologist to give him a look. Then, we both strained our ears to listen.

“Where is that journal?” it hissed with fifty rotting tongues. “This is his room, I know it’s here somewhere… Where could it have gotten to? Oh, I wish I was back home in Alagadda with my theater troupe!”

The Anesthesiologist had to translate this, of course, as the worm spoke in a combination of various Romance languages. But what struck me was that one of the languages was French.

It was hard to live with the Doctor for long without hearing him speak French, and in recent months he had begun to teach me. I wasn’t a ready student in the tongue, but I tried my hardest in order to hear the pride in the Doctor’s voice.

Suddenly I had an idea. I gestured for the Anesthesiologist to give me the endoscope.

“How would you like to bring your theater troupe a magic talking bag that can give you all kinds of props when you need them?” I said in French, as best as I could.

“Who said that?” said the worm, looking about.

“I did,” I said. “It’s me, the magic talking prop bag on the floor.”

The worm finally focused its front end on the bag. The Anesthesiologist and I stood far enough back in the bag that we were well out of sight of the worm, and it had not the manual dexterity needed to open it enough to see us.

“Listen, Bag,” said the worm, “I’m here on business, and I can’t spare the time for pleasure. I have to get back to my troupe; we’ve got to rehearse the big scene at the end of Romeo and Juliet where I eat the Montagues, the Capulets, and the Priest. Or the big scene at the end of Faust where I eat God and Mephistopheles. Or the scene at the end of-”

“You need help finding the journal, don’t you?”

“I’ve been looking for it for ten minutes now! I’m at the point where I’m about to start eating everything in the room and waiting for the journal to come out the other end.”

“If I tell you where the journal is, will you take me with you to Alagadda?”

“It’ll save me a lot of stomach pain,” the worm agreed. “I don’t like to eat the scenery when I’m off the stage; there’s so much flavor in balsa wood that’s missing whenever I eat something intended to last.”

I directed the worm, as slowly as I dared, to go through the motions necessary to open the drawer where the Doctor kept his journal. The worm progressed painfully slowly, but at last one of the corpse’s hands had a firm grip on the journal.

“A deal is a deal,” I said. “Take me to Alagadda.”

“Agreed,” said the worm. “But I only have one functioning hand that I can use to grab things.”

Before the Anesthesiologist could finish translating this last statement, the worm swallowed the bag whole.

The Doctor

“We’ve got your journal,” said the Alagaddan servant behind the dumbwaiter. This sentence made me want to retreat into a fetal position.

“What do you have to fear?” said a sardonic voice in the back of my mind. “If everything you believed is correct, then this will change nothing.”

It wasn’t the voice I hated. It was the fact that the voice found purchase, found a vulnerable place to hit.

The book lay on the dumbwaiter, and I shrank from it.

A memory: when others had asked me about the nature of the Pestilence, I had referred them to the journal. I had laughed as they said they couldn’t read it; the old joke about a Doctor’s handwriting apparently rang true.

But I could read my own handwriting, and that made the book that much scarier.

Would it stand up to defense? Could I assemble from it a coherent argument to dash the hopes of the Masked Lords who would leave me in anguish?

I picked up the journal and flipped to the first page.

The Companion

The stomach acid of the worm hurt.

As the worm squirmed through the fabric of reality with a sound like a thousand vomiting alpacas playing badly tuned electric guitars, the Anesthesiologist and I tried as hard as we could to pull the bag’s zipper closed from the inside. It didn’t work all that well. We managed to get it just barely closed, but even then it sprayed like an acidic sprinkler, and it got inside my clothes and onto my skin, which it burned.

And I screamed as the journey came to an end, and my ears popped as the pressure outside dropped and acid ceased to flow as we heard the disgusting sound of the bag being excreted.

The Anesthesiologist ripped open the zipper and carried me outside to a less acidic spot, to the general amazement of the masked figures around us.

He took off my clothes, save for my undergarments which the acid had not touched, and dragged out of the bag a portable water-shower, complete with pressurized tank. He sprayed me all over, save for under the mask which had manifested on my face, and then began to apply some sort of healing salve.

As long as I live, I never want to feel the pain of that acid again.

“You did great back there, you know that?” he said. “Both your original plan and that improvised one were good ones. I’m glad you’re taking the initiative.”

“Ow,” I said. “Ow ow owie ouch.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

It took a while, but the pain subsided into a dull roar. I began to get my higher mental functions back, enough at least to be concerned about what this theater troupe we found ourselves with was going to do with us.

“Who are you,” asked one of them at last in perfectly accented Keplerian, “And what are you doing here?”

“My name is 5a82,” I said. “This is the Anesthesiologist. We come to Alagadda to bring the new Black Lord back home, where he belongs, before this place robs him of all he is.”

“You would stand against the Court of the Hanged King?” their spokesperson said. “You are a fool, and it would be better for all concerned if you had never come here.”

They gestured to the group. “We are victims of an incurable virus,” they said. “It rapidly degrades our muscles and motor nerves. We serve the Court, and give them shows and sacrifices, for only the power of the Lords of Alagadda can keep us alive and moving, in constant pain though we may be. We are wholly given over to them, for only they suffer us to live. And it is the same with a thousand other souls, reality benders and common folk alike. How can you stand against such a Court, whom the commoners and gods all give their support?”

I tried to hold my face in my hands, but the path was stopped by the beak of my mask. It was a small beak yet, barely fit for a hummingbird, but a beak nonetheless.

Stars swam over my eyes as I stood up. The pain from the burns almost floored me, but for the moment I needed to be on my feet.

“I’ll tell you how, mon chéri,” I said. “Because I am the cure.”

Part 1

All That Copper, Glowing Fine

Part 3