He winced as he heard the pathetic squeak that was his own voice. 
The quivering words hung in the air as the crowd silently stared at 
Anzak, waiting for him to continue. With another deep breath, he 
started again. 


"lam Diviner and Castman Anzak Tilochtil, seer-class scholar of his 
Graciousness Diviner Artem and the Teachings of Marzed, the True 
Creator, bless His name." A few words of grace swept through the 
crowd. "I've come from the Crown of Velvet to deliver a message of 
great importance to you, the city of Tentaboe, just as my fellow 
Diviners have done for all other cities in the caverns." 


Anzak could feel their eyes on him as they waited, hushed and still. 
He pondered running. His eyes turned to the right, and there was 
the City Head, encouraging him with a plastic smile. He blocked the 
path to the only ramp off the stage, and if Anzak tried to jump off, 
he'd be enveloped by the crowd. He was trapped, and before 
starting back up he whispered a small prayer under his breath. 


"A great discovery has been made recently, about the caverns we 
all live within. Long have we suspected that something lies beyond 
the walls. Now, we have strong evidence to suggest that not only is 
there a world outside our own, but that it's closer to us than we could 
have known." Excited murmurs came from the onlookers, quickly 


dying down. Anzak looked down at his perfectly memorized speech 
and feigned difficulty reading it. He wiped some sweat from his brow 
and looked back up at the crowd, his voice trembling slightly. 


"You see... well, we believe the world outside is bigger than ours. 
For all we know, there's billions of worlds beyond that world, and 
maybe those worlds each have their own interesting story, and..." 
Anzak was trying his best to avoid outright telling the truth, but their 
faces told him it wasn't working. 


The City Head stepped up beside the podium, his smile turning 
towards the onlookers slightly. "Diviner Anzak, you're going to have 
to explain to us what this rea/ly means." He gave the scholar a wink, 
and some in the crowd chuckled lightly. 


Anzak, however, seemed near tears. There was no dodging it now. 
"Um.. well, the world we're in isn't really... a world." He saw their 
faces contort with confusion, and he decided the only way to do this 
was to say it without pause. "We've discovered two hidden caverns, 
each hidden by large deposits of velvet and whitestone. One led to a 
massive chamber of unending, salty water, while the other led to a 
chamber filled with a strange, beating boulder of velvet." 


He shuffled his papers and quickly continued, staring down at the 
podium. "It is the Teaching's personal opinion that we are within a 
creature of massive stature. Our velvet and whitestone are the flesh 
and bone of this creature, and we are living off foreign byproducts 
ingested somehow by the creature, for the purpose of supporting our 
life. We believe that this is a sign that we are somehow connected 
with this creature beyond our living inside it, and that... well.." His 
bony fingers clutched at a whitestone tablet of official decree by His 
Graciousness Diviner Artem, as if to defend his words. 


"Because the creature is of flesh, it is not divine. It is not Marzed, 
and Marzed did not create us. We were born." 


He stared out at the gaping crowd, and hoped that the silence would 
soon end. 


Both Diviner Anzak and City Head Hervult hung from the curtain 


pole of the stage, ropes tightly fastened around their necks. Flames 
enveloped their now scarred bodies, the bloating in their faces 
further distorting their bludgeoned faces. Behind them, the curtain 
sat still as somebody ran up and crudely smudged onto the crisp, 
white sheet with charcoal. 


BLASPHEMOUS SCUM 


Behind the sheet, the crowd boarded up the ground floor doors and 
windows of the Announcement Hall. The walls were coated with the 
glass and thick liquids of various alcohols as the storerooms were 
raided and pillaged, their sweet nectars and burning droughts 
flowing freely in the gutters and streets. The great statue in the 
center of the square lay in ruins, its terrible visage pitted and scarred 
by the stones and fists of the crowd. Throughout the streets the 
guilty and innocent met in the shared bonds of fire and blood, giving 
their lives for their foolish arrogance. Somebody came with flame 
and lit up the Hall, burning the locked Castmen within. Those who 
attempted to brave the fall from the upper stories were met by the 
bloodthirsty mob, each armed with hate and rage. 


Those among the armed forces joined the mob; those who didn't 
were quickly put down. The city of Tentaboe was swept up in the 
chaos of its wrath, and those unfortunate enough to heed the words 
of Anzak found themselves among the growing casualty count. 
Housing and businesses were robbed in the chaos, and soon the 
mob found themselves unsatisfied with the burning of the Hall. The 
fire spread further into the city, and soon, it would leave nothing but 
an ash stain within the cavern. 


Each of the five cities under the Teachings saw a similar scenario, 
with resistance being quickly cut down. In the wake of their own 
destruction, they blamed their behavior on the corrupted Diviners. 
The mob marched on towards the Crown of Velvet. Torches bobbed 
along the road in a steady, concentrated line. The crowd would see 
that the Teachings of Marzed were met with a baptism of fire for 
their sins, and in its place would come a new age. 


Before this could happen, though, the Crown had to fall - and they 
would have to do something about this cavern of beating stone 
Anzak spoke of. 


| feel a strange, burning pain in my abdomen, slowly 
filling up where | believe some of my burden to be. This 
feeling is familiar, but this time it worries me. It is larger 
than | have felt before. It lies close to one of my many 
hearts, perhaps my body finally starting to fail me. | 
wonder if it is my cargo, celebrating what | do not: that 
my death will be sooner than | had hoped. 


| suppose my time is coming, though. After all, | am just 
an old man in the sea. 


« Under the Sea | HUB | » 


Subject: D- 


Procedure: Subject with a game avatar 


occupying the city of , , iN 1938 is 
instructed to place a classified ad in the 
Gazette reading “Dr. is a loser.” 


Results: Subject types in command PLACE 
AD IN GAZETTE THAT READS "DR. 
IS A LOSER." The game parses 
command and prints five pages of narrative in 
response covering approximately three hours 
of game time including a bus ride to the 
Gazette offices, small talk with the receptionist, 
and a discussion with an editor about the 
content of the ad. Foundation researchers 
uncover microfiche records of the 12/01/1938 


issue of the Gazette containing the ad 
“Dr. is a loser.” Score increases by 100 
points. 


Given the importance of these results, | will 
overlook the fact that | am not amused— Dr. 


Test 023 
Date: / /19 
Subject: D- 


Procedure: Subject with a game avatar 
occupying the city of , , iN 1924 is given 
a first edition hardcover of Slaughterhouse 
Five by Kurt Vonnegut inscribed by Dr. 

Once subject is playing game, subject is 
instructed to go to bank and place in- 
game copy of the book in a safety-deposit box. 


Results: Subject attempts to comply, but is 
caught in the crossfire of a gang war. Game 


Strange Things Happen at Sea 


The old man felt a pain in his gut, something quite unlike anything 
he'd ever felt in his life before. 


He'd drifted for a very long time, before he landed here, on this 
world, and he'd slept in the depths of this world's sea for a long time, 
as well, though not as long as he'd spent in the void. He could still 
remember the bright, burning stars; the brightest of reds, the shining 
yellows, the dim and dying white stars, or the gigantic, short-lived 
blues. Those would burn brightest, and, as the old phrase on 
candles would attest, burned shortest. 


Here, in the sea, there was only the dark, the quiet, and the world of 
life coming into existence inside himself. He'd felt them digging, 
clawing, scratching, for a very long time. More recently, he'd felt 
them walking, burning, and building. He knew his time was coming 
to a close. When the final moment came at last, he felt great pain at 
first. Then, for a brief moment, he felt he could see again, that he 
was in the void, with nothing impeding his vision. He saw that the 
sea was blue, and thought it beautiful. 


Dr. Reginald Philbert Lionel Archibald Westinghouse 
Wondertainment II], MD, PhD, DDS, Esq. was a man with very 
simple goals. The most basic, and most driving, of these was to 
make people happy. So it was that, when his patented 
Wondertainment Grumpometers!™ began to go off with numbers far 
higher than they ever had before, he took it upon himself to go out 
and find the source of the trouble. 


That is how the good Doctor found himself in his WonderMoBoat! 
with Humphrey, Humphrey, and Humphrey, three of the doctor's 
finest English bulldogs2, and Humphrey at the helm, in the middle of 
the Pacific Ocean. Sitting on the seat next to Wondertainment was 
his well-trusted WonderBeam™, guaranteed to shoot pure, 
unfiltered wonder into the souls of even the biggest grumps. 


As he was coming up on the source of the grumpiness, 
Wondertainment couldn't help but smile in anticipation of curing this 
particular case of the grumps. He turned to the Grumpometer!™™M 
display in the console, and saw that the grump was about a mile to 
starboard. He turned that way and saw a very, very large wave, 
moving towards him. He looked to Humphrey, Humphrey, 
Humphrey, and Humphrey, chuckled, and gave the closest of them 
a hug. When the wave hit them, the boat turned skyward briefly, 
and, as he stared at the beautiful, blue sky above him, Doctor 
Wondertainment had a strange thought: 


| wish I'd had time to raise a daughter. 


Then the abyss took him. 


A person was sitting on a dock on a small island in the middle of the 
ocean, writing idle musings in their journal. The birds were flying, the 
sea rolling, the ships sailing, and people enjoying their evening. 


They stopped a moment. Something seemed off. They looked up 
from their journal, to the birds, to the people, then to the sea. 
Except... The sea was not there. It had receded. 


This is unexpected, they thought to themself. Low tide isn't for a few 
more hours, and the waters have drawn back even further than that 
already. But "unexpected" doesn't need to be bad. | think I'll go out 
and look at the tide pools. 


The person walked down the dock back to the shore, enjoying the 
sounds of children playing in the tide pools, of people chattering, of 
life simply happening. They wrote something down in his journal, 
and then breathed in deeply, taking in the smell of the sea. They'd 
reached the shore and had been walking down the ocean for a few 
minutes at this point. 


They heard a scream. The person stopped, turned around, and saw 
the people on the shore running inland, away from the ocean. They 
turned back to the ocean, and saw a wave the likes of which few 
people had ever seen, and even fewer had survived. They jotted a 
short note in his journal, tore out the page, turned to the sea a final 


time, and let the waves take them. 


A small team of aid workers would later find a note that said, simply, 
"The blue sea calls to me, and | answer her. — Pangloss" 


Footnotes 

1. An innovative modification he'd made to his WonderMobile, in that 
it floated most of the time. 

2. They were actually all the same dog. Don't tell them that, though. 


Olympia Project 


Project Codename: Olympia 

Project#: PRJOLM-000134 

Clearance and File#: NPF-00051473 

Head Researcher: Professor K. P. Crow 


Project Aims: To successfully create an artificial humanoid through 
the use of several SCPs, and use it to the benefit of the Foundation. 


SCP Utilised: 


¢ SCP-040 - for the altering of the raw materials 
[DISCONTINUED FOR THIS PURPOSE DUE TO 
TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES] 

* SCP-040 - for the altering of the integrated product 

* SCP-148 - as a raw material 

* SCP-148 - as a raw material 

* SCP-158 - for the altering of raw materials, for obtaining 
composite materials, and for final integration 

¢ SCP-291 - for altering composite materials, and for final 
integration 

* SCP-500 - as a raw material 

¢ SCP-542 - for altering of materials and the finished product, 
as well as a surgical consult 

* SCP-784 - as a raw material 

¢ SCP-914 - for the altering of raw materials 


Raw Materials: 


¢ Aselection of forty (40) D-Class personnel, five (5) male, 
thirty-five (85) female, all within the twenty (20) to fifty (50) age 


bracket. All are relatively healthy, with no major medical 
issues, although some do have slight mental issues. All have 
been personally hand picked by Prof. Crow. 

Five (5) Cray CX1, sixty-four (64) core, entry-level massively 
parallel supercomputers. 

Five (5) BASLER L304KC 4080 pixel Trilinear line scan 
camera. 

Fifty (50) pounds of SCP-143. 

Fifty (50) pounds of SCP-148. 

Five (5) pills of SCP-500 


Refining and Altering Procedures: 


* Experiment Log 158-AG 

* Experiment Log 914-THETA 

* Experiment Log 040 [DISCONTINUED AT THIS STAGE IN 
THE PROCEDURE DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES] 


Integration Procedures 


* Olympia Integration Experiment ALPHA - Integration of the 
physical body from composite materials 

* Olympia Integration Experiment BETA - Integration of the 
mental body with the physical body 

* Olympia Integration Experiment GAMMA - Testing of the 
subject's physical and mental capabilities 

* Olympia Integration Experiment OMEGA - Final 
Experiments 


Mass Production: 


After examining the prototype model (Olympia Zero) for several 
days, it has been decided to implement the wide scale production for 
various purposes. 


Production Model Changes and Procedures 


Experiment Log 158 AG 


Experiment Log of: Professor K. P. Crow, regarding 
SCP-158 in use for the "Olympia Project". 


Date: 29-11-2008 


Pre-Experiment Note 

I've gathered up several D-Class personnel, having interviewed and 
evaluated them all, and picked those with personalities and 
characteristics that | like, or would be useful. Some are male, others 
are female, as | believe a soul transcends the flesh it is interred in. 


But the purpose of this experiment, is to test the "extra" capabilities 
of the device, those spoken upon in the heavily damaged sections of 
the book. I've pored over them incessantly, trying to glean as much 
information as possible from it, but the instructions | managed to get 
were sketchy at best, and downright unhelpful at worst. 


But that will not deter me. I'm a researcher! Trial and error are my 
middle names! 


¢ Experiment-01 


| withdrew the first subject's soul. Try as | might, | was unable to do 
anything extra to it, but then again, there was such a small window 
of time for me to utilize it and try everything. But on the bright side | 
managed to reverse the process. While that had been done before, 
no one has discovered the sequence needed to activate, operating 
on blind luck. This is the first thing I'll concentrate on. 


¢ Experiment-05 
Hah! I've done it! It wasn't that hard. 
¢ Experiment-06 


You know, I've noticed that there's a small period in the middle of 


the operation where the process pauses, as if it's waiting for further 
commanas. | think that's when the further inputs can be made. I'll 
have to start checking. 


¢ Experiment-07