A toy robot shuffled out of the safe and stood amid the wreckage, 
looking for what had caused it to be activated. Its boxy plastic shape 
had trouble moving over the plaster and metal shards, but it 
eventually managed to find a section of flat ground without too many 
obstructions. 


"ROBO-PAL?" 


Another shape began to stir amid the dust. The toy robot turned 


towards the sound. 


"GREETINGS ROBO-PAL. HOW DO YOU WANT TO HAVE ROBO- 
FUN WITH ROBO-DUDE TODAY?" 


"Who dares to call me robo-pal. | am the Crushmaster, doom to all | 
survey. Gaze upon my might and weep. Identify yourself, that | 
might know whose destruction | shall sow." 


The shape advanced through the cloud of dust until it resolved itself. 
It too, appeared to be a robot, but assembled haphazardly from a 
collection of items that didn't seem like they should even form a 
functioning machine. Its head was a broken upside-down voltmeter, 
its arms were wrenches sticking out of flashlight bodies, and its legs 
seemed to be made from a combination of springs, metal piping, 
and sporks. 


"| AM ROBO-DUDE, ROBO-PAL. | AM EQUIPPED WITH OVER 
THREE HUNDRED FUN ACCESSORIES TO MAXIMIZE 
PLAYTIME ENJOYMENT." 


The Crushmaster wobbled awkwardly over to the plastic toy, nearly 
tumbling over a few times, before stopping maybe a meter away. It 
stood a good four or five times taller than the diminutive Robo-Dude, 
and if anyone else had been watching, they might have thought that 
it tried to stand a little higher on its sporks than it had a moment ago. 


"lam Direfist the Bloodeater and | shall maximize my enjoyment by 
squashing you beneath my almighty boot. Prepare to face my 
wrath." 


Robo-Dude looked down at Direfist's sporks. It looked back up. 


"ROBO-DUDE SHALL ENGAGE IN ROBO-DANCE TO MAXIMIZE 
YOUR ROBO-FUN." 


Robo-Dude engaged its Robo-Dance. 


"Very well, puny weakling, |, Sparklord the Barbarian, shall defeat 
you at your Robo-Dancing to bring humiliations galore upon you and 
your ilk before | rend your soul into itty-bitty pieces." 


Sparklord began to gyrate precariously about its centre of mass, 
hopelessly out of tune with the tinny music emerging from a speaker 
somewhere on Robo-Dude's body. 


"ROBO-DUDE HAS RECOGNIZED A ROBO-DANCE CHALLENGE. 
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. ACTIVATING ROBO-DANCE-OFF 
MODE." 


"Activate all that you wish, but your fate is sealed. The Kill-o-tron 
can not be defeated. | shall render you unto dust with my mad 
dancing skills." 


The two mechanical men began to dance in earnest. Robo-Dude 
accessed its optimum dance programming, performing to its 
maximum abilities. Kill-o-tron stumbled around the open space, 
falling over no less than seven times, and somehow managed to 
lose one of its wrenches. 


After about thirty minutes, the music stopped, and the two robots 
ceased dancing. Kill-o-tron managed to untangle the tines of its 
spork from a metal wire it had caught in. 


"ROBO-DANCE IS COMPLETE, ROBO-PAL." 


"Ha. Pathetic one, you have been schooled in the art of the dance 
by none other than Mechanobasher, Scourge of a Thousand 
Worlds. Kneel before me before | end your worthless existence." 


Mechanobasher, Scourge of a Thousand Worlds, raised its arms up 
in victory, its remaining wrench waving to an imaginary crowd. 


"ROBO-DUDE HAS USED ITS ROBO-DANCE-JUDGE 
PROGRAMMING TO DETERMINE A WINNER. THE WINNER IS 
ROBO-DUDE. CONGRATULATIONS ROBO-DUDE." 


"What insolence. Prepare to feel the sting of Doctor Von Vroom, 
Purveyor of Doom." 


Von Vroom began to advance on Robo-Dude, its sole wrench 
twirling menacingly in its socket. 


"ROBO-DUDE HAS DETECTED A SORE LOSER. ROBO-DUDE 


DEPLOYING HYDROGEN CANNON TO EDUCATE ROBO-PAL 
ON BEING A GOOD SPORT." 


The compartment on Robo-Dude's chest opened, and a jet of water 
shot out at Von Vroom. Von Vroom's sporks lost traction on the wet 
floor, and it fell over onto its back. 


"How dare you. Right me immediately so that you may taste your 
destruction at the hands of the Supreme Stabbinator." 


Robo-Dude watched as the Supreme Stabbinator flailed around on 
its back as managing to make small circles on the floor, but it was 
unable to lift itself off of the wet concrete. 


"| shall obliterate you atom by atom until not a trace that your 
worthless form even existed upon this wretched planet if | am not 
righted immediately, so says |, Deathkill the Destructionator, King of 
Kings and Lord of Lords." 


"DO NOT INTIMIDATE ROBO-DUDE.” 


Change 


Hello Everett. You were expecting me? How ha- 
Ah. Quite right, | suppose. May | sit? Thank you. 


| can only imagine what you must think of us by now. How many 
have come to you this month- Five? Seven? Enough, at least, to put 
you in an... uncomfortable position. Half of the O5 council, here in 
your office, sputtering like mad men and contradicting each other on 
even the most basic of details. But we're very good at contradiction 
around here, aren't we? | think you would have found your answers 
on your own if things had gone differently. The research you were 
doing was damned close to the crux of it. Problem is, you got caught 
up on a red herring, and it can't have helped that the old man got to 
you when he did. If you'd kept looking, you would have noticed soon 
enough: The Factory isn't the only thing that stops making sense if 
you look at it for too long. Yes, the other organizations as well, but 
that's only the start. 


Just stop and think about it for a moment. It amazes me how much 
we get you people to ignore— do you honestly believe that we keep 
a dozen drafts of 001 as part of some inane security policy? You've 
never wondered why so many reports and logs for missions and 
experiments we've never approved- much less written- just happen 
to spring up on our servers? How so many hundreds of 
inconsistencies were introduced to our records? Do you really think 
we're that inept? 


...you do, don't you. Ohohoho, you do. No wonder you've held your 
tongue this long, ‘just smile and nod and the crazy old men will shut 
up and leave me to my work’. You disappoint me Doctor. You've 
come far enough to know that it couldn't be that simple. 


Then allow me to level with you. From the top. 


The things we lock away are wrong, Everett. Fundamentally, 
unequivocally wrong. They contradict everything we know about 


math, science, religion, life, thought, they violate reality itself. 


No, of course I'm not talking about the Greens. They're troublesome, 
but in they end, they are fundamentally human. In some ways that 
makes them easier to manage than even our safest objects; but you 
have the right idea. A mortal mind wielding such power is trivial. But 
what do you suppose happens when it manifests on its own? You've 
been through enough of the archive by now to know all three 
answers. AK, BK, CK. The world twists, and in the worst case we 
don't even know that it's happened. 


Yes Doctor, spontaneous reality shifts. It took decades to determine 
the cause, but in the end it was laughably simple. On its own, an 
SCP object merely bends. Gather the right ones together, bend 
things far enough in the right direction, and sooner or later 
something breaks. Upon advancing to level 5 we're all trained to 
notice the signs, when possible. We secure a new item, we transfer 
an object between sites, and within a day or two we'd know that 
something was off. 


The implications should be obvious; our very existence is 
jeopardized by even the simplest of operations. We tried everything 
we could think of- we limited the number of objects per site, 
prohibited needless cross-testing, minimized transfers, spread out 
as much as possible, even authorized decommissions for most of 
the more trivial anomalies. It wasn't enough. And even if it was, it 
wouldn't stop Dark, the Hand, the Church, and god knows who else. 
Hell, we have reason to believe that those damned cultists are doing 
it on purpose. 


That's why Ten started pushing for a different approach. We can't 
prevent the problem; why not turn it on its head? We started to look 
for ways to use the shifts to our advantage. The potential for 
knowledge alone... And if we could find the pattern... 


Everett, have we had this conversation before? 


Never mind. In either case, we built Site Zero in the twenties once 
we had a better handle on how it all worked. | never understood a 
lick of the physics, but we were assured that it would deflect the 

effects enough to preserve our memories and our copy of Central 


Records between shifts. And it did. The advantage it gave us was 
beyond anything we had imagined. Before the site was completed, 
we controlled at most fifteen percent of all known SCP objects. We 
now consistently control at least seventy percent between shifts, and 
the protocols we enact from Site Zero can recover most of them in a 
month or less after even the worst events. 


There were problems of course. When any of us leave Site Zero, the 
re-briefing can take weeks if our timing is bad. But it goes deeper 
than that. Even those of us that never leave started to notice 
inconsistencies, internal fragmentation. Database checks began 
turning up entire unknown files in the shift-safe system, but that was 
the least of our concerns. It got worse over time, and after a while 
we started to... well, | think you've already guessed the rest. 


I'm not so bad off as most of the others yet, but it's only a matter of 
time. | can't keep it straight in my head. There's no record of half of 
the senior staff I've worked with. | don't remember any Insurgency, 
much less a credible threat from Iran. On more days than not, | don't 
even have my designation right. 


No, of course not. That's the problem; we have the wolf by the ears. 
We don't have much time left, and we cannot allow our failure to 
become the Foundation's. Really, though, the solution is quite 
simple. We need re- 


Very good, Doctor. Perhaps there's hope for you after all. 
| think we're done here. We'll be seeing you. Soon. 


And Everett? Give my regards to whoever arrives as Eight. 


SCP-811: Swamp Woman 


Item #: SCP-811 
Object Class: Euclid 


Special Containment Procedures: SCP-811 should be kept in a 
climate-controlled, cylindrical glass enclosure, between ten (10) and 
twenty (20) (inclusive) metres in diameter, filled to a depth of no less 
than two and a half (2.5) metres on average with wetland soil and 
stagnant fresh water. It is to be furnished with a variety of aquatic 
plants from its native swamp in __, as the remaining vegetation 
there has exhibited the adaptation to regrow quickly from injuries 
endured during contact with SCP-811 as long as the roots are 
undamaged. Logs of manageable size and additional humus-rich 
soil may be provided for good behavior. 


Water depth is not to exceed half a metre (0.5) at its lowest point. 
Height of the enclosure must be no less than five (5) metres above 
the highest soil point. Temperature is to be kept at 25°C, and 
humidity should be kept above 70%. There is to be a 
decontamination airlock chamber between the door into the 
enclosure and the door into the rest of the facility. Air that is 
ventilated into the enclosure should not be recirculated back into the 
rest of the facility under any circumstances. The methane resulting 
from SCP-811's normal interaction with its environment is not 
anomalous and may be bottled for use as fuel. No heated elements 
or open flames are permitted inside the enclosure. 


The enclosure must be tested daily for pH and microbe levels in 
both the soil and water, as well as for changes in chemical 
composition. Enclosure should be cleaned biweekly, preferably by 
D-class personnel. All discarded waste should be put in quarantine 
for analysis before disposal by standard biohazard protocol. 


Subject is to be given at least five (5) kg of live food 24 hours after 
its completion of its previous meal. Subject is not averse to preying 


Channeling Flows 


...With the proper application of the Aethers, as well as something... else, | 
think we can acheive it. Takwin. The true alchemy, artificial life. If only I 
could discover what that last element was, that last peice. The spark of life. 
Its composition eludes me... 


-Excerpt, Personal Journal, Jabir ibn Hayyan 


Arturo's hands moved in a circle in front of him, his fingers stiff and 
trembling slightly. His eyebrows were screwed up in concentration, 
and sweat beaded across his forehead. "I think... | can feel it." 


Ruslav leaned against the workbench on the edge of the room. His 
expression was impenetrable. "You feel the air conditioning." 


Arturo's eyes opened and he blinked at Ruslav and Adebeyo, his 
shoulders dropping. "Nothing? Not a single current? | thought | felt a 


Ruslav held up a hand. "There are currently no Aether currents 
flowing through the lab. As | said: air conditioning." His eyes alighted 
expectantly on the younger man, whose shoulders dropped a bit 
more. 


Arturo thought for a few moments, and finally a few syllables slid 
from his mouth, clumsy and not perfectly formed. "Aeronatum et 
karasishui et muram. Not ‘et muras'. The Seventh Language is not a 
toy. Do not play act at its use." Adebeyo's voice rumbled from 
across the room. 


Arturo nodded, and invoked the Seventh Language again, saying 
thanks to the Aeronous Aether for cooling them through the Air 
Conditioning, resettling his robes on his shoulders. 


Ruslav nodded in affirmation. It was a good sign. The first few times 
they'd tried to instruct him, the boy had gotten upset at the harsh 
corrections, but he'd been showing real progress. He took a step 


forward, and brought his crozier up, the heavy cold iron vibrating 
ever so slightly in his hands. "The Aeronous Aether is fickle. This is 
not something new. Try and concentrate harder." 


Arturo closed his eyes again, and held his hands out loosely in front 
of him, his fingers splayed. He continually murmured in a different 
language, the Sixth Language. The language of calling and 
summons. His pronunciation was more accurate this time, and the 
currents began to twitch and drag towards the lab. 


Ruslav could feel them as clearly this time. A few more moments, 
and the current flowing over the Site library would probably come 
near enough. He made a few gestures with his hand behind his 
back, and mentally spoke the words of the Fourth Language, one of 
support and binding to aid the youth. 


Arturo's eyes flew open, as his robes flapped slightly with the breeze 
that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. "Et mesh mento 
aengh kn'kc ka!sem." The syllables flowed steadily now, as Ruslav's 
face slowly split in to a smile. 


He's got it. He finally attracted the currents. He stepped forward with 
a small coin, and held it out in front of the boy, who sagged as he 
completed his intonation. The coin vibrated slightly in Ruslav's 
hands, and he reached forward to clap the boy on the shoulder. 
"Congratulations, Apprentice. | feel that is enough to prove your 
mastery of the Aethers. You are no longer a dabbler. You are one of 
the Wise, and | formally welcome you to the First Circle." 


Adebeyo strode forward, and placed a hand on the boy's other 
shoulder. "Congratulations, Mr. Genuomo. | am proud of you. " 


Arturo nodded, and sagged down on to the stool in front of his own 
workbench. It was mostly cleared, having no equipment of his own 
at this point. The only items on it were the beaker his previous 
teacher had given him, and the small journal that was quickly filling 
with cramped writing. He took notes on everything the two elders 
said. 


"Thank you, Elders. | appreciate your guidance in this." His eyes 
shifted to the coin. "What are we going to do with the coin? It has 


some of the Aeronous Aether in it now, yes?"