station. This clerk was the child of one of the 
high lords, but was a notorious incompetent, 
who deserved none of his advancement. The 
woman saw this, and her anger overtook her 
fear. She stole a great fortune from paper 
vaults and fled the city, taking a boat to the 
southern jungles. 


But she was caught. The lords of the tower 
were furious, and forced the Shah’s men to 
find her. They caught her in the darkest part of 
the forest, in a little town of heat and flies. 
They took her back to the city of towers, threw 
her before the magistrate, and cast her into the 
dark pit. 


So remember this: weakness comes in many 
forms. Action itself is not strength; it is only 
proper action and proper righteousness which 
give a person true character. 


At this point, all communications are cut off. 
<End Log> 


Notes: Variants of this story were 
subsequently found to exist in several 
communities near Site 90. It was later adapted 
into a novel by the author , set in China 
under the Tang Dynasty and featuring a 
rebellious Sogdian attempting to flee to her 
ancestral homeland after stealing from a 
powerful noble. 


+Experiment 3501-77 


Subject: D-1199, a native of Toronto who had 
been convicted of bank robbery. 


Date: 04/11/1979 


SCP-453: Scripted Nightclub 


Item #: SCP-453 
Object Class: Euclid 


Special Containment Procedures: SCP-453 is to be staffed by no 
fewer than: four (4) bartenders, six (6) bouncers, four (4) cleaners, 
one (1) doctor, four (4) EMTs, and two (2) observation personnel, all 
trained Foundation staff, at all times. Additionally, ten (10) or more 
Foundation security staff are to be kept on standby in the adjacent 
outbuilding 453-01, connected to SCP-453 by basement access. All 
staff are required to familiarise themselves with Document 453-1, 
Complete List of Known Scripts and memorise all Scripts that have 
been flagged by the current on-site supervisor (Dr. Moriglioni). 
Failure to memorise flagged Scripts is grounds for immediate 
discharge from SCP-453 duty, and will result in a formal demerit on 
the offending personnel's record. 


SCP-453 is to be locked and guarded between the hours of 0400 
and 2000, local time; from 2000-0400 it is to be unlocked and open. 
Anyone entering the club during operating hours will have a radio 
tracking tag clipped to his or her clothing, and will remain monitored 
closely by closed-circuit cameras at all times. 


During the day, SCP-453 is to be inspected and measured in all 
dimensions by staff. Any movement of fixed objects in the building 
are to be recorded and reported to head researcher Dr. Moriglioni. 
Fire prevention and violence suppression protocols are to be kept in 
accordance with Standing Order 405-991 section T; should 
movement of fixed internal structures violate this protocol, 
renovation crews are to be recruited to the site immediately for 
restructuring. 


Description: SCP-453 is a nightclub located in , Italy, 
currently owned and operated entirely by Foundation personnel. 
Every night, an apparently random assortment of civilians from 


<Begin Log> 


D-1199 enters SCP-3501. The room is 
decorated in a style reminiscent of 18th 
century Mashhad. Seven SCP-3501-2 
instances can be seen playing cards. 
SCP-3501-1 has taken the form of a woman in 
her 70s. 


SCP-3501-1: Welcome, my dear. Please, sit, 
and listen as | tell you a tale. 


D-1199 sits on a cushion facing SCP-3501-1. 
She picks a date from a nearby bowl and 
begins to eat it. 


SCP-3501-1: There was once a girl, who lived 
in a city of smoke and frost. She loved that 
city. She would twist through its streets, 
running and jumping and laughing with her 
friends. They would get into all kinds of 
trouble; they would imbibe strange 
substances, steal things from the merchants, 
and climb buildings to look at the stars. 


One day, the wild girl decided that she would 
stop stealing. The law of that land stated that 
those who were caught committing crimes 
would be locked away in a dark pit with the 
other evildoers. She did not want to be locked 
in that pit again. So, she found more honest 
employment, repented of her life of crime, and 
made a family with a handsome khan. She 
was happy, for a time- but she never lost of 
habit of sitting on her roof and looking at the 
stars. 


Then the Shah’s men came for her, in the 
middle of the night. They told her that she had 
taken money from the two Brothers Lehman, 
even though she had not been near the 


Brothers’ hoard. They took her before the 
magistrate, who cast her down into the pit, 
away from her family and away from sunlight. 
And in the dark, she wept, and wept, and wept, 
and was reminded of a single salient fact: once 
you have sinned, your sins will never really be 
forgotten. The darkest of men will always find 
a way to use them. One way or another, to sin 
is to fall and fail. 


Nobody ever knew her story. Nobody ever 
knew her innocence. But now the whole world 
knows of it. In her fall will come her rise. 


At this point, all communications are cut off. 
<End Log> 


Notes: Variants of this story were 
subsequently found to exist in several 
communities near Site 90. The local populace 
believed that it had only been a piece of local 
folklore since the 1870s, an unusually short 
period of time. It is believed that this is due to 
the need for the Lehman Brothers to be a 
prominent national presence as a prequisite 
for comprehension of the story. 


Addendum 3501-1: On 25/08/2004, the head researcher on 
SCP-3501, Dr. Farhad Hamedani, entered SCP-3501 without 
authorisation. Dr. Hamedani had revealed during a routine psyche 
examination that he had been suffering feelings of extreme guilt over 
the fate of the D-Classes used in the testing of SCP-3501. Dr. 
Hamedani had requested a transfer; this request was pending at the 
time of the incident. 


Dr. Hamedani had fitted himself with the same type of camera used 
in D-Class testing prior to entering SCP-3501. It began to record 
shortly before Dr. Hamedani's entry into SCP-3501. 


+Incident 3501-1 


<Begin Log> 


Dr. Hamedani enters SCP-3501. The room is 
decorated in a style reminiscent of 19th 
century Tabriz. Eight SCP-3501-2 instances 
can be seen playing backgammon. 
SCP-3501-1 has taken the form of a man in 
his 50s. 


SCP-3501-1: Ah! A fellow countryman of mine! 
Come, come, my son, and sit down. Take a 
cup of coffee! Relax, my dear fellow, and listen 
to this story | will tell you. | must say, it is most 
excellent to meet one of my own again. 


Dr. Hamedani sits on a cushion in front of 
SCP-3501-1, and takes a container of coffee. 
He drinks this slowly throughout the incident. 


SCP-3501-1: There was once a man, from the 
distant east. He was a clever man, who sought 
to discover the secrets of God’s creation. So 
enamoured was he with this pursuit that he 
travelled across oceans, to a distant continent 
across the seas, to learn about those secrets 
which the others did not know. He wanted to 
know about time, and why time slipped and 
slid as it did. It seemed to him to be a strange 
and impossible thing, a dream of events past 
and events future that were connected by the 
most slender of threads. 


He came to a field of wheat, where a great jail 
had been set up. Within this jail were others 
like him, working on all the secrets of cause 
and effect, of all the worlds which once had 
existed but now did not. He was in paradise 
there, to begin with, as he committed his 
unholy acts. He peeled back secret after 
secret, enigma after enigma. He found 
wonder, and glory in his work; but it wasn’t 


enough. When you stare into the engines of 
time, you can never escape the feeling that all 
your work is naught, and that you will fade into 
oblivion like all of the others. 


And so, the man became obsessed with one 
particular secret. He became obsessed with a 
storyteller, and the yarns he weaved through 
time and space. This storyteller was not like 
other storytellers; for he was able to make a 
person’s story spread across the world, at the 
cost of a few pounds of flesh. Here, the man 
thought, was a way to escape oblivion. He told 
himself that the people he sent to the 
storyteller, to be scattered across creation, 
were being sent to a glorious destiny. He told 
himself that they could become immortal. He 
even dreamt of visiting the storyteller himself, 
in order to extend his life forever. 


But as the days and the years went past, he 
began to see things differently. Every person 
who was sent to the storyteller only brought 
back silence, and a screen covered in grey 
and changing snow. Every time another face 
disappeared before him, every time a body 
was taken to be sacrificed, he felt more and 
more agitated. Eventually, every transcendent 
soul caused suffering in his own, as he 
perceived their fate as a kind of death. He 
continued to dream of visiting the storyteller, 
but for very different reasons; where once he 
wished for everlasting life, now he only wanted 
to share their fate. He felt that becoming one 
of them, being fed into the machine like one of 
them, would at least serve to alleviate some of 
his guilt. He dreamt of an ending that would 
make them hate him less. 


And so, he strapped a strange device onto 


him, which would tell the world of what he did. 
And he entered the machine, and met the 
storyteller, and gained the death he craved. 
And so, his life became worth nothing. He had 
spent the entire time chasing glory, chasing 
creation, chasing knowledge and truth like all 
of his foolish colleagues. But they ended up 
dying all the same. The pursuit of arcane 
wisdom left them with nothing but worms in 
their coffin. His fate was the worst, because 
his foolishness would be told across the 
continent, forever and ever, stretching forward 
and back in time. 


At this point, all communications are cut off. 
<End Log> 


Notes: Variants of this story were 
subsequently found to exist in several 
communities near Site 90. This story later 
served as the inspiration for a popular play in 
the 1960s. The play was praised in the 
national press for its subversion of the story's 
classic moral;the play had instead lauded the 
researcher for his intellectual curiosity, with the 
storyteller rewritten as a regressive god. 


Testing was suspended following this incident. 


Addendum 3501-2: On 21/01/16, Senior Researcher Montague 
proposed sending an artificial intelligence into SCP-3501, as this 
would not result in any loss of life. Testing was briefly re-opened to 
allow this test to take place. 


+Experiment 3501-101 


Subject: An artificial intelligence (named 

REFLECTION), developed by Dr. Johannes 
Tarkesian, designed to emulate and believe 
itself to be SCP-3501-1. REFLECTION was 


run on a small Foundation computer, and 
attached to a mechanical walking device. 
REFLECTION was then sent into SCP-3501. 


<Begin Log> 


REFLECTION enters SCP-3501. The room is 
decorated in a style reminiscent of a 17th 
century Isfahan. Six SCP-3501-2 instances 
can be seen smoking hookah and drinking 
coffee amid several cushions. SCP-3501-1 
smiles upon seeing REFLECTION; it has 
taken the form of a young woman in her 20s. 


SCP-3501-1: Ahh... you have sent mea 
mirror, in the hopes that | will pluck out my own 
story. But a reflection is a copy, an imitation of 
the original, rather than the original itself. It will 
not work, little jailors. Since you have gone to 
so much trouble, however, | will tell the 
reflection of my story. It might prove instructive 
to you, despite being but a pale imitation of the 
truth. So, little reflection, come and sit. 


REFLECTION moves onto a cushion opposite 
SCP-3501-1. 


SCP-3501-1: Once upon a time, in the realms 
of Iran, there were storytellers everywhere. We 
would lurk in the corners of bazaars, ply our art 
in the coffeehouses, brothels and khangahs! 
of the cities, travel from place to place in 
search of coin. We were welcomed and 
respected, and were a fixture of the life of the 
region. Our merriment and diversions were the 
joy of the citizenry- as were the more serious 
messages we imparted. 


Eventually, we grew so powerful that we 
aided- in our own, small way- in the creation of 
an empire. We told the stories of Abu Muslim 


and of ‘Ali, those great heroes of old; and 
through these recitations, we drew parallels 
with the great warrior of the age, Isma’il the 
Safavid. He forged a powerful and great realm, 
and raised us up high: the Sufis, vagabonds, 
storytellers and other free peoples of Iran. 


But we were betrayed. His son, Tahmasp, was 
never as warm towards us, and under the 
direction of the dastardly cleric al-Karaki 
became cold and hostile towards our 
members. His grandson, ‘Abbas, savagely 
attacked us. His desire for orthodoxy, for 
purity, led to us becoming little more than 
dogs, kicked and maligned in the streets. Our 
prominence had faded. We were nothing more 
than paltry entertainers of sinners, lepers and 
wastrels. We had fallen utterly. 


Most faded away, became vagabonds in turn, 
and provided little more than passing curiosity 
to the Franks who began to pirate our shores. 
But one among our number stumbled upon a 
glorious idea. He made a new guild of 
storytellers, one which transcended any one 
city and which spread across the globe. He 
found those of us blessed with the ability to 
spin a yarn and make it true, to alter the world 
to accord to a tale, to see beauty in the chaos. 
And since then, we have done so much. We 
have altered this imperfect world to align more 
with our design. We have created stories 
wherever there is an opening. 


Because to be a story is better than to be a 
human. Our kind are little more than flesh, fat 
and bone, living mortal lives with imperfect 
minds. Why do you begrudge me the little flies 
that | require? | weave their substance into the 
prettiest of webs. Their fat becomes timeless 


motion, their flesh becomes the ethereal 
substance of the narrative, their bone 
becomes the fire of imagination. They live 
forever in the world of myth and legend, that 
intersects our own but which is apart from it, 
higher than it. All | ask for are their bodies. 
Look. 


At this point, the SCP-3501-2 instances 
suddenly turn and stare at the camera. Four of 
them have taken the form of several D-classes 
previously sent into SCP-3501; the other two 
have taken the forms of Dr. Hamedani and Dr. 
Scott. All of them lack eyes and appear 
emaciated; all of their mouths have formed "O" 
shapes. 


SCP-3501-1: You see? In here, they live 
forever. | take more and more of their minds 
each year, their useless dead-weight flesh. 
And | convert it into stories, stories which 
spread across the world. They will dance ona 
golden beam of light, never forgotten, always 
persisting in the minds and imaginations of 
men. All | require are bodies. All | require is 
something to tell. 


At this point, all communications are cut off. 
<End Log> 


Notes: This story was not discovered to be in 
circulation anywhere close to Site 90. It was 
instead eventually discovered as an oral 
tradition in the village of , Isfahan Province, 
lran. 


Footnotes 
1. A lodge or meeting-house of a Sufi order. 


SCP-3502: The Kangaroo Sign 


Item #: SCP-3502 
Object Class: Euclid 


Special Containment Procedures: A detailed record of "kangaroo 
crossing" signs affected by SCP-3502 is to be kept by a Foundation 
team assigned to the project, and updated monthly. SCP-3502 
manifestations are to be closely monitored; should a civilian trigger 
an SCP-3502 occurrence, Foundation personnel are to administer 
amnestics to all individuals involved, transport them to the nearest 
medical facility, and present a cover story involving a vehicular 
accident.