Now, the Foundation runs, at any given time, about five-to-six- 
thousand shell companies that it uses to launder their money. | know 
that we've been trained to stop this kind of thing, but what would you 
rather have: a million dollars go missing from the profits of a tech 
firm in Kansas, or a nuclear warhead going off because the 
Foundation couldn't hire enough guards for the third quarter? That's 
what | thought. 


Every now and then we get the IRS or another tax agency on our 
backs, and it's your job to shake them off. One of the easiest ways is 
to confound the paper trail. You can make an oroborous of shell 
companies, feeding off of each other. For instance, S & C Plastics is 
a shell company for Soy-Corn Produce, which in turn is a shell 
company for Samson and Cooper Pharmaceuticals, and that is a 
parent company of South Coast Publishing, which is a shell for 
Spicy Crust Pizzeria, which loops back to S & C Plastics. They're all 
legitimate businesses; we do actually deliver pizza, make 
pharmaceuticals, and produce plastics. They just all fund us, and we 
can't have ourselves discovered. Of course, failing this, there's 
destruction of the documents. 


Excellent question! Shredding is an incredibly inefficient method, 
anyway. If a document needs to be lost, you burn it, and shred some 


Addendum 839-1: Current "flavours" of SCP-839 


"Flavour' Colouratio Organ Other Designation 
Replacec Effects 
Cherry Red Heart Increased | SCP-839-1 
(Pictured blood sugar, 
above) Type-2 
Diabetes 
Blue Blue Kidney (One) Blue urine | SCP-839-2 
Raspberry 
Green Apple Green Eye (One) | Mild SCP-839-3 
hallucinations, 
"greenish" 
tint 
Watermelon Pink Brain [DATA SCP-839-4 
EXPUNGED] 
Lemon Yellow Stomach Less Fibre | SCP-839-5 
content, 
diarrhea 
(Note: 
recommended 
for use with 
other 
instances of 
SCP-839, 
due to the 
ulcers 
created) 
Grape Purple Lung (one), "Fruity" smell SCP-839-6 
to breath 
Orange Orange Liver Increased | SCP-839-7 
acidity of 
bloodstream 
(Not 
recommended) 
Footnotes 
1. Similarities between the life cycles of SCP-839 andSCP-1517has 
been noted. Investigation into the possibility of a shared origin is 
under investigation. 


decoys. There's an incinerator in literally every location you'll work. 
And if it's down, just ask someone in the morgue; they've got three 
for burning body parts per site, at least. 


Anart Historian 


Good evening, ladies and gents, and welcome to— 
Are you fucking kidding? 


Three years. Three years in a row, and no audience. My department 
makes botany and occult studies look well funded. 


There's not even a projectionist. Fucks’ sake, I'm just talking to 
myself, aren't 1? | could talk in gibberish for the next hour and still 
get paid. 


...| wonder how much trouble I'd get in if | put Anomalisa on. 


Excitement 


Howard knew he should be afraid. 


He knew any place where they insisted on calling you by a number 
was a place you didn’t want to be. He knew that a lab coat gave a 
man the idea that he could do things to people that he normally 
wouldn’t do. He had heard the whispers. He knew that sometimes 
the men, clad in disposable looking orange jumpsuits, that they took 
away from the dormitory were sometimes never seen again. 


He knew he should have the same hollow, terrified look he saw in 
the eyes of all the other D-Class. But each time he searched his 
heart for fear, he never found it. Perhaps it was there somewhere, 
but it was buried beneath a much stronger feeling. 


He was excited. 


The world before his incarceration at Site-48 had been one of banal 
certainties. Up was up. People were people, just greedy animals 
pushing and shoving to reach the tops of their sad little hills. Money 
governed the world. The secrets kept were gray: who killed who, 
who bought who, which politicians were puppets, which corporations 
were the puppeteers. There was nothing hiding in the dark. There 
was no veil to be pierced. Death was not a door, just a fade to 
endless black. 


On his first day here, he was escorted to a room that had seemed 
like any other, but when he entered it he had found himself in a vast 
darkness, reaching back and up into an eternity. The only light came 
from a circle of red candles, flickering madly without source of wind. 
In the center was a little girl in a white dress, wearing pigtails held by 
ribbons the same murky red as the candles around her. She was 
staring at him with a fuming gaze and a malevolent expression on 
her face. 


She hovered three feet off the ground. Her eyes were red. 


He had been given a line to deliver to her, but it wasn’t until 
prompted by the voice in his earpiece that he remembered to do 
anything but meet that crimson gaze with gaping awe. 


Howard cleared his throat and spoke his line. “We await your 
prophecy.” 


She spoke to him in his father’s voice. Not his rich, laughing 
cadence, but his deathbed voice. Choked with cancer and dread, in 
those terrible days when the sickness had found its way up his spine 
and into his brain. 


The words didn’t matter. He was sure they had recorded them 
because they never asked. He wouldn’t have remembered anyway. 
Listening had been a migraine, drawing whimpers from his lips and 
a torrent of blood from his nose. And there had been pictures forced 
into his head, the fingers of her words driving into the soft of his 
mind like a boot into mud. Buildings falling. The sky burning. A 
hundred thousand souls afflicted with boils and plagues. The end. 
The end of everything. 


He shuffled back to the dormitory led by two guards with hands 
loosely clasped around his biceps. They knew he was beyond 
running. What they didn’t know was that beneath his physical 
distress, the seed of the excitement he would come to know had 
found purchase in the soil of his heart. 


A demon, he thought, / just met an honest to god motherfucking 
demon. 


Perhaps that wasn’t accurate. Maybe she was just some 
megalomaniac, psychic eight year old with a serious grudge to bear 
on the human race. It didn’t really matter, did it? Whatever she was, 
he was certain she was real. The veil he never believed was there 
had been lifted. 


There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt 
of in your philosophy, Howard thought, and if he hadn’t been so 
drained by the encounter, he probably would have let out a little 


giggle. 


He lay on his bunk feeling as if he had run ten miles, his body limp, 
but his mind raced. Surely they didn’t need this massive facility for 
just one evil little girl. When they brought him here, they had 
ushered him through endless gray corridors, down countless floors 
in a freight elevator, and then through another maze until they 
reached Dormitory 64. It housed about fifty of his orange clad 
brethren. Even if this was the last of the dorms, which he doubted 
very much, that was at least 300 inmates just like him. Far too many 
to use on one little demon. What else did they keep here? How 
many other monsters were there? How many other Sites like this 
existed. 


His stomach suddenly cramped and he rushed to the latrine in his 
cell just in time. As his body released its sick, he still knew was 
luckier than some of the others. If the rumors were to be believed, 
and at this point why not, diarrhea and a nosebleed was a birthday 
party compared to the other options available. 


The days passed. They had taken him to his new acquaintance 
twice more and each time had been the same. The line was spoken, 
his body and mind was assailed, his weakened form escorted back 
to his cell to lay limply until the sickness came. The miraculous 
might have become monotony if not for the growing excitement. He 
had been tempted to break the script, to ask the little prophetess his 
own questions, but for all his excitement and curiosity, he was no 
fool. Disobedience was not tolerated by men who named you a 
number. 


And so Howard sat, watching his fellow D-Class over a meal that 
was as institutional as the aluminum tin it came in, waiting for his 
next visit with what he had come to think of as his Little Demon. 
There was never much conversation in the cafeteria, and if there 
was it was always in a conspiratorial whisper. Most of the men, like 
himself, had come from prison and were well accustomed to the 
culture between inmate and guard. You did your best to let the 
screws know as little about you as possible. Any information was a 
weakness to be turned against you. They find out you like fresh air? 
Expect solitary. They find out you like to jog to pass the time in the 
yard? Expect the next blow to the knee. The find out you’ve made a 
friend or two? Watch how long they let that last. 


He found the guards here were different, though. They didn’t look to 
take advantage of your humanity. Rather, they seemed to disregard 
it entirely. They all looked on you with flat gray eyes, the way 
someone might regard a piece of furniture: invisible until it had a 
use. It wasn’t like they had to worry about escape attempts or 
violence. The place defined the word fortress: clearly underground, 
everything made of concrete and steel, cameras roosting in every 
possible corner like sleeping bats. And the guards had armor out of 
some sci-fi war movie, sometimes wearing helmets that obscured 
their faces behind black, reflective glass. Not quite Stormtroopers, 
but the comparison could be made, though he doubted there was 
anything amiss with how they aimed the rifles they carried. His uncle 
had been a sergeant in the Marines, and every one of these guys 
made him look a soft as taffy. 


If the guards had more interest in the inmates, they may have 
noticed that he was different than those around him. He didn’t hunch 
over his meal, his posture bent by terror, like a rabbit expecting a 
hawk to swoop in a flash of talons and feathers. He surveyed the 
dorm like a man on a lunch break, sitting on a park bench and 
enjoying the breeze. He had been in prison long enough to know 
you didn’t sit around smiling unless you wanted someone’s fist to 
change the shape of your mouth, but if the guards had looked 
closer, they might have seen something in his eyes or the corners of 
his mouth to betray him. And so, relaxed as he was, on the verge of 
lounging in his seat waiting to visit his Little Demon, he was the first 
inmate to notice when things suddenly went wrong. 


Howard saw when the guards simultaneously stiffen, a few raising 
their gloved hands to their ear, listening intently as some 
transmission came over their radio. He saw when half the contingent 
guarding them moved hurriedly towards the door, the first urgently 
punching the keypad. When the door hissed upward, he heard a 
popping sound he knew well from what he thought of, affectionately, 
as the Bank Caper that ultimately ended with his residence at 
Site-48. Of course, on that occasion it had been far more intimate, 
not distant pops but loud bangs and the whine of bullets meant for 
him, missing their mark. He had sent his own in return, and with 
better aim. He had no illusions that he was not where he belonged. 


The door closed behind the troop and for a few minutes, all was 
quiet again. A few of the other inmates also looked towards the 
door, roused from the daze of their imprisonment by the activity. It 
seemed that would be the extent of the excitement and Howard 
relaxed a little. 


Then the door exploded, showering the nearest two tables with 
chunks of concrete the size of volley balls. 


The hallway was awash in red light and now gunfire hammered the 
air in the cafeteria. A guard went pelting past the door from the right, 
followed by a tendril of scarlet brilliance. It winked out a moment 
later, finding its target past Howard's view. Following it close behind 
was his Little Demon, glowing feverishly. She drifted past the hole 
that was once a door. She never spared the inmates a glance, but 
several of the ribbons of red light flowing from her flew into the room 
and struck some of the survivors of the initial blast. They were 
replaced with gleaming skeletons that stood, held by some invisible 
force. When she had passed, they collapsed in a clatter of bones. 
The remaining guards in the cafeteria pursued, opening fire that 
crashed around them like thunder. And then they, too, were gone. 


The silence that followed was a physical thing. No one moved. Then 
an alarm began to bray and their hypnotism was broken. One of the 
prisoners suddenly leapt from their collective paralysis and fled 
through the door. He was momentarily followed by a torrent of the 
rest. 


All this Howard watched from his seat, now tense and upright, but 
unmoving. He waited until but a few stragglers remained and rose 
from the bench. The fleeing inmates had their choice of left, towards 
the murderous thing that had floated past them, and right, from 
which the thing had come. There was no consensus, and so they 
split into twin orange rivers. The handful that remained busied 
themselves by cowering beneath tables and in corners. The alarm 
continued its shrill cries. 


He rose and cautiously approached the opening. He should have 
been afraid. Or gleeful at the prospect of escape. At the very least, 
some engine of self preservation should have roared to life and 
made its demands. He felt none of these things. 


What he felt was excitement. And purpose. 


Maybe none of the others had seen the world remade in his Little 
Demon’s image. The seas of bile. The sky choked with ash. The 
twisted, festering corpse of a world destroyed. Maybe they hadn’t 
seen what he’d seen, or maybe they didn’t care, but he had and he 
did. When he reached the door, he turned right, towards where the 
men in white coats had imprisoned his Little Demon. 


The hallway was littered with bones. Most of the many doors had 
suffered the same fate as the one he had passed through, and their 
gaping holes revealed some workstations, but mostly more endless 
corridors. This place was even bigger than he had thought. 
Hopefully his Little Monster hadn’t blown the doors off the cells of 
some of her fellow inhabitants. Occasionally he would see a man in 
an orange jumpsuit darting down one of these revealed 
passageways, but his corridor was clear of people. The bones 
scattered about were probably a strong deterrent. He proceeded 
onward, doing his best not to disturb the gruesome little piles and 
trying not to be too hard on himself when he did. The bones' 
previous owners were well beyond caring. 


The hallway was awkward and angular, he assumed by design. It 
made traveling quickly difficult, surely an extra measure against 
escape attempts of any kind. His Little Demon had been unhindered, 
though, sometimes leaving a smoldering hole where a jutting corner 
had been. Even still, his view forward was often obscured, but he 
was good with direction, and knew he was going the right way. 


But with his line of sight obscured and the endless howl of the 
alarms, he had no awareness that he was no longer alone until the 
D-Class crashed into him, hard, running in the other direction. He 
didn’t know the guy’s name, but he knew him just the same. It’s hard 
not to remember the tallest, biggest, meanest looking bastard you’d 
ever seen in your life. 6'6" at least, probably over three hundred 
pounds, the epitome of criminal muscle. Howard rebounded off him, 
and then was instantly pulled close as the big moose grabbed his 
shoulders and began to shake him. He made no demands. His face 
was blank with idiot, animal terror, barely seeing the man he was 
throttling. Howard weighed in at a modest 170, and flopped like a 
doll in the giant's grip. Even still, Howard prided himself as a man 


who knew how to handle himself and stay cool when things went 
sideways. Had his head not been whipping back and forth, he might 
have rolled his eyes.