With a forlorn sigh she bids herself to stand. As she does so the 
Elder takes a few minutes to look one last time at the billowing ash 
clouds, their endless roils lit by webs of white and blue lightning on 
their jagged paths to strike the desert looking like the fingers of 
Grandfather Storm seeking to touch the land himself. About to turn 
away Gorana stops, something catches her eyes: a figure floating 
above the sands amidst the webs of electric fury. She blinks only for 
a moment and it is gone; surely Gorana only saw a mirage and not a 
man wreathed in blue light. 


Elder Gorana chuckles at herself nervously, the storm must have 
thrown it at her as a last trick to fool her aging mind. She turns to 
head toward her sheltered hut and stops dead; her eyes freezing 
and her heart nearly stopping as well. There stands the figure of a 
man with flesh of silver, suspended above the ground by means the 
Elder cannot fathom. The man, if he can be called that, is wreathed 
in a faint globe of blue energy. Gorana understand what has come 
to her poor village, she begins to weep involuntarily while 
uncertainty at the base of her spine grows to a full shiver of morbid 
anticipation. 


The figure opens its mouth and an alien sounds comes from within 
him, it sounds like sand being run through a metal sieve. The Elder 
balks, covers her ears in shock, and stumbles back onto the pier 
with fear taking her heart in its icy grip. The man growls, as if 
insulted, and extends his hand. It is at this moment, that Elder Eliza 
Gorana recognizes the man, no she recognizes the myth that he 
represents. "Storm Caller," she whispers in the few seconds that 
remains of her life. 


Blue fire spirals around his fingers throwing off the same aura as 
Grandfather Storm in the background. The air around Gorana hisses 
and crackles as lightning bursts forth from his fingers and into the 
old woman's body. In an instant her body is burned away, her flesh 
charred off, and her bones turned black. A thunderous roar of air fills 
the void left in Gorana’s place and blasts the remains apart. The 
offering dish is sent skittering across the desert by the blast surface 
before sinking beneath the gray sand. The storm rumbles across the 
docks and into the streets, propelling wind strong enough to rip 
foundations of clay and wood from the ground. Blowing ash fine 
enough to clean corpses of flesh through the air. Within the torrent, 
while buildings are being ripped asunder, the figure turns around 
and walks back into the desert, as a herald of Grandfather Storm's 
wrath. 


Forces beyond the storm's edge that rips a small village from the 
desert's edge breaks against a small, impenetrable field of energy 
that moves within the sand storm. It appears from the outside as an 
ovoid shell of blue light crackling with violent electrical arcs 


annihilating any particulate daring to touch its surface. Inside the 
shield a man is suspended above the thin ash-sand and travelling at 
a constant rate 40 m/s, by his own calculations, towards the 
epicenter of the storm. 


Specialist Ztan wipes remains of the elder savage from his silver 
form-fitting uniform, only pausing a nano second to contemplate how 
the particulates made it through his energy shield. He dictates a 
mental memo to reprimand Engineer Gran for not calibrating the 
nanites of his suit correctly. Ztan cannot have lesser beings touching 
his superior form of their own will, dead or alive. 


Amidst his own calculative thoughts a cyan and rose message 
barges its way through, pushing aside less than critical information 
to gain Ztan's attention. The process is labelled with an encryption 
several steps above Ztan's own, with a nano second of contempt he 
answers the call, «Archivist Mu. Speak.» 


«Were you required to incinerate the lesser form?» 
«Are savages required to be spared the data to live?» 
«Answer my query, Specialist.» 


He knows a reprimand will require him to return to port docks and he 
does not have the deviant capacity to refuse such a punishment, 
yet. Ztan corrects the speed calculations to accelerate his velocity 
so that he will reach home port within an hour. A jet of ash, pushed 
by the sudden force of acceleration, blasts into the air behind his 
ovoid energy shell and is violently dispersed by the storm's winds. 


«| was not required.» 


«Specialist Ztan, return to your Home Port immediately. You are to 
undergo five-hundred cycles of basic algorithms and five-hundred 
cycles of complex computation recitations for your programming 
deviations. » 


Ztan runs the calculations through his processes, it will take him 
3.6*1013 nanoseconds to complete this punishment. Basic 
algorithms and complex computation recitations, a predictable 


punishment for a minor deviation. They will take no time at all, at 
least that is what he wants to think, but Ztan knows very well that 
Archivist Mu will send Brute Enforcers to scald his processors and 
test his concentration during the recitation. 


«Affirmative, Archivist Mu. Expect my arrival within 3.6*1012 
nanoseconds.» 


«Affirmative, Specialist Ztan.» 


The connection closes, leaving Ztan alone within his own data and 
codes. He closes off his thought processes for the moment and 
redirects most processes to the calculations needed for his flight. 
The rest of the spare processes are directed to start planning for his 
arrival back at Pupil. Ztan knows very well now what waits for him 
and needs time to prepare. 


In about an hour, give or take a few hundred nanoseconds, Ztan 
breaches the inner wall of the sand storm and passes into what the 
Archivists call 'the Eye of Ysone’. An inner circle clear of the storms 
that rage in the ash desert, what the low data savages call 
Grandfather Storm. The Eye of Ysone -much like the eye of a 
hurricane leaves a great expanse of land open to the skies, free of 
cloud and wind. Unlike a hurricane, though, this Eye has an iris. 
Within the iris is the city of Pupil, home of the Digital Children, 
birthplace of Ztan's data core and what he considers no longer to be 
his home. 


The iris is a great culmination of dark, alien storm clouds trapped in 
a state of endless rage while held fast by ancient technology. An 
alien intelligence: deeper, older, and greater than anything the low 
data savages can dream of roils in a state of constant activity. 
Clouds in the shape of a cortex pulsate with arcs and flashes of 
lightning, a deep sentience railing against the bars placed around it. 
The storm is trapped, imprisoned by towers constructed of polarized 
metal that ring inner iris. They form a barrier between them of 
unknown ionized energies that prevent its bulk from moving or 
escaping from the Eye as well as serving to expel its furious 
energies outwards to avoid an energy overload within their grid. 
Resulting in the endless over-land hurricane that the low data beings 


refer to as Grandfather Storm. These constructs are relics of an 
older world, artifacts of a more complex age known only to the 
residents of Pupil as: The Age of Containment. 


Underneath the iris, shielded from prying eyes of the outside world 
by the captured storm and its cortex of clouds, lies Pupil. Pupil is a 
city of towers that act as lightning rods, constantly being struck at a 
rate of almost six-thousand times per cycle by lightning, absorbing 
energy from the intelligent storm to power vast facilities below the 
surface. It’s size is colossal and even more massive below the 
surface than above, much like an iceberg taking up most of what 
could be called a crater at the heart of the Eye of Ysone. It is built 
upon the ruins of an ancient Age of Containment complex where the 
first Digital Children were produced by Admin Sys, Pupil’s enigmatic 
and mysterious ruler, who had taken control of the facility after its 
low data guardians had been expunged from reality by several 
cataclysmic entities. 


Archivist Mu stands within the confines of her small office in the 
Tower of Archives and recites the Admin's Code of Beginnings while 
organizing a specialized squad of Brute Enforcers to be created just 
for Specialist Ztan's punishment cycles. She looks out over the 
myriad lightning rods of Pupil, eyes shielded against the hundreds of 
blinding strikes of energy coming from above. It is the second tallest 
of Pupil's towers next to the central spire inhabited solely by Admin 
Sys. Mu sighs, knowing full well that eventually Specialist Ztan will 
deviate fully as did the others in his generation. The Export 
Generation were designed as such by Admin Sys, built on purpose 
to be unfulfilled by Pupil and its digital paradise. Designed to roam 
the world outside the Eye of Ysone in search of perfection and 
completion. 


Mu furrows her brow and looks at the display in her hands. It shows 
the level of deviation last recorded in Specialist Ztan, a glaring red 
bar telling her that dangerous deviant tendencies are predicted with 
his evolved programming. Mu believes that she cannot let Ztan 
deviate fully, her ethics and core processors both shiver at what 
could transpire if that outcome is realized. Specialist Ztan has the 
deviant capacity to evolve more powerful than even Admin Sys. 


Additionally there is a deep corruption within his code, one that 
cannot be rooted out by practising routine algorithms or complex 
calculations. She archives her thought process, cutting it off from the 
task at hand. She sends an order to the freshly birthed Brute 
Enforcers in the heart of the Containment complex below. 


«Target: Specialist Ztan. Order: Deletion, priority: Rubicon Omega.» 


For the RE-PUBLIC 


Kalefheit, a city of opulent splendor and obscene poverty. 


Kalefheit, the place where fortunes came and went as quickly as the 
sunset. 


Kalefheit, the beating, chaotic heart of the New World that had been 
born from the remnants of the old. 


Kalefheit, where Meilar was currently wondering why he hadn't done 
something more interesting with his life than taking up his father's 
dilapidated antiques shop. 


"Here | sit," he said aloud to nobody but the gods. "A plain store for 
a plain existence." 


Unlike his brother, who made his fortune (and had met his untimely 
death) venturing into lost ceitus for Wonders, he had chosen the 
"honorable" profession of maintaining the family shop. Here there 
were no magical leftover relics of the gods. Well, maybe some had 
been Geyre's domain when he walked among mortals, but they 
were mundane in both appearance and power. 


Strange, rusted devices (including one shaped like a flexed arm with 
some sort of horizontal holes on it that he was idly toying with now) 
that had no use to the people of his time co-existed with stacks of 
books in the old language. Even as the city's scribes had begun the 
slow process of re-introducing a written form to human tongue, none 
had deciphered the words of the ancients, least of all an old man like 
himself. Only the goodwill of scribes and the curiosity of children and 
a few adults gave him enough money to pay for both food and tax. 


As he watched people pass by his small nook in the open-air market 
with little interest, he contemplated whether or not he would have 
liked to have died in a ceitu seeking adventure - or, most suicidally 
of all, going south. Why live if | only breathe and sleep, amidst 


showed a perfect molecular bond of tissue to metal, cleanly severing 
the entire lower portion of the agent’s abdomen which protruded 
from the opposite side of the bulkhead. When questioned, the agent 
reported feeling no pain but was unable to move his lower 
extremities and exhibited signs of extreme nausea and early stages 
of acute radiation poisoning. Attempts to recover the surviving 
portion of the agent’s body from the ship ultimately resulted in his 
death. 


During the same incident, three Class D personnel had been 
assigned to clean the engine room. Most of D-12074 was found in a 
crankshaft, with his legs fused to the ceiling over a meter away from 
him. D-23574 was fused to a deck plate, and his lower extremities 
were never located, nor was D-75224, who simply vanished. Other 
cases have seen personnel molded into solid steel doors while still 
conscious, or alternatively missing limbs that are incorporated into 
the structure in other locations of the vessel. 


Standard operating procedure calls for termination of these victims, 
as all efforts to sever them from the ship have resulted in death of 
the affected. 


Addendum: As of the late 1950s, numerous books and eyewitness 
accounts have surfaced in attempts to shed light on the Navy’s 
failed experiment, further complicating containment procedures. 
Thanks to the efforts of well-placed field agents, the Foundation has 
managed to mostly discredit these sources, leaving the experiment 
as a well-known but “officially debunked” urban legend. All published 
accounts have been doctored to indicate DE-173 (USS Eldridge) as 
being the test bed for the experiment, thus drawing attention away 
from SCP-595. All previous records of the experiment have been 
successfully obtained or were destroyed by the United States 
government. 


Addendum: Attempts to disable the devices located within SCP-595 
have all met with failure, as the shutdown procedures documented 
in manual -3A require more than the allotted safe margins of time. 
The use of electromagnetically shielded remote vehicles is currently 
being investigated. 


« SCP-594 | SCP-595 | SCP-596 » 


scrolls and devices | cannot understand? 


A loud thump on his stall snapped him out of his dreary 
contemplation. He looked up, and saw a familiar face as he adjusted 
his glasses. 


"Ahh, Kallin." He smiled as the young man idly brushed dirt off his 
arm. "Even when you bring me something | would never sell ina 
thousand seasons, you are fine company." 


"Thank you, Meilar," Kallin replied, politely returning the smile. "With 
York's blessing, our fortunes will rise soon. Perhaps then we may 
join the citizens of northern Kalefheit in wealth!" 


"Bah! Even with all the riches of this city, | would not want to spend 
my time with those insufferable fools." 


Kallin was hardly surprised at his reaction; they'd had the same 
conversation nearly every time he had fetched the old man a relic. 
This time, however, he hoped their routine talk would shift in a 
different direction. 


"| have come across a strange tome, found while | was trading with 
the local tribes." 


Meilar raised his eyebrow. "Trading?" 
"Alright, | stole it from their relic collection." 


A raspy, cackling laugh escaped his mouth. "You should know better 
by now than to try that on me! Continue." 


"Look at the symbol on it." 


He did so, and saw an ancient book with a dark cover and some sort 
of half-circle with a line through it, surrounded by another circle. 


"It is unusual, | will concede. But what does it mean?" 


"It is not the symbol itself, but rather the...effect reading it has. Take 
it and see for yourself.” 


"Very well, I-" 
Wait. 
"Did you say 'reading'?" 


"Yes. | was able to understand the old language as | read it. But 
when | opened another tome, it did not have the same effect." 


For the first time since he had met Kallin, he was speechless. They 
had finally found a Wonder. A book in the old language that could be 
understood... 


"The scribes would murder their mothers to possess this," he finally 
managed, "and yet you brought it to me." 


Kallin smiled again, more warmly than before. "You know | am not 
from Kalefheit originally, but a tribe to the west of here. Among my 
people, there is a saying - 'He who breaks a bond will be broken by 
the gods.’ You are my friend, Meilar, and | would not abandon you in 
our hour of greatest triumph."